Qass 
Book. 




/A ! 



TYPICAL MODERN 
CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 



i 



Typical Modern 
Conceptions of God 



By y^ 

Joseph Alexander Leighton 



A thesis accepted by the University 
Faculty of Cornell University for 
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 



1 901 






Copyright, 1901, by 
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 



All rights reserved 



Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York 



CONTENTS 



PAGES 

Chapter I. Hegel's Conception of God . . . 1-34 

Chapter II. Fichte's Conception of God . . . 35-73 

Chapter III. Schleiermacher's Conception of 

God 74-102 

Chapter IV. Mr. Spencer's Unknown God . . . 103-125 



NOTE 



These studies of typical and contrasting ideas of God in modern 
philosophy were originally submitted to the Faculty of Cornell 
University in June, 1894. Various causes have delayed the printing 
of them and they are now presented in a revised form. They 
constitute part of a work soon to be issued by Messrs. Longmans, 
Green, & Co. 



Geneva, N. Y., September, 1901. 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS 
OF GOD 

CHAPTER I. 

fichte's conception of god. 

I. Introductory. 

Fichte's utterances on the philosophy of re- 
ligion extend over almost the entire period of his 
philosophical activity. They mark the develop- 
ment of his thought from 1790 (he was born in 
1762) until 1813, a year before his death. His 
views on the nature of God contain the core of 
his philosophy, for, in common with the other 
great post-Kantians, Schelling and Hegel, the 
goal of Fichte's philosophy is the discovery of 
an absolute first principle which shall for the 
philosophic thinker fill the place that, in com- 
mon unreasoned thought and in popular theol- 
ogy, is occupied by the doctrine of an anthro- 
pomorphically conceived God. Fichte gave re- 
peated expression to his doctrine of God and of 
religion, but it was not until the year 1806, 
in The Way to the Blessed Life {Anweisungen 



2 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

zum seligen Leben oder auch die Religions lehre)^ 
that he developed his doctrine with systematic 
fulness. The difference in tone and in expres- 
sion between this work and his earlier essays and 
fugitive remarks on the same subject, together 
with his repeated esoteric and exoteric expositions 
of the Science of K?towledge, have given rise to 
the view that Fichte's earlier and later philoso- 
phies are radically different. I hope to show 
that, notwithstanding certain variations of ex- 
pression and a shifting of emphasis, Fichte's doc- 
trine of God is nevertheless a unity in which the 
change is a development. In order to exhibit 
this unity we must follow the historical order of 
his writings. 

2. Fichte's First Period. 

The earliest expression of Fichte*s views on the 
nature of God is contained in his Aphorisms on 
Religion and Deism (1790), written before he had 
made the acquaintance of Kant^s Critique of Pure 
Reason, In these he says that it seems to be a 
universal need of the heart to seek in God attri- 
butes which speculation must deny to him. If one 
follow one*s reflection {Nachdenkefi) one can reach 
only the bare conclusion that there is a necessary 
Being through whose thought the world arises. 
The first cause of every change in the world is the 
original or creative thought of God. Therefore 
every feeling and thinking being necessarily exists 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 3 

just as it is.^ But there are moments when 
the inexorable God of speculation fails to satisfy 
the heart. There arises intensest longing for some- 
thing more than this abstract principle. Head 
and heart are in contradiction. One cannot resolve 
the contradiction speculatively. One would be 
saved from it if one could only cut off determi- 
nistic speculation where it crosses the boundary 
line between theoretical thought and the desires 
of the heart. But how can one do this?^ 

With this interrogation the record of Fichte^s 
early religious difificulties closes. Very soon after- 
wards he began the study of Kant's philosophy, 
and we know, from his letters to his fiancee, writ- 
ten at this time, with what enthusiasm he em- 
braced Kant's doctrine.^ No one, he said, had 
refuted his determinism, but it had failed to sat- 
isfy his heart, and the Kantian criticism seemed 
to him to leave a place for the needs of the indi- 
vidual in the determination of the nature of God. 
His Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation^ writ- 
ten in 1 79 1, two years earlier than Kant's corre- 
sponding work on religion, and submitted to Kant 
for examination, although wholly Fichte's own 
in method and style, is a criticism of the possibil- 
ity, nature, and limits of a divine revelation based 
on Kant's practical philosophy. 

^ Werke, V., p. 6. ''Ibid,, V., p. 8. 

* J. G. Fichte's Leben u. Briefwechsel, by his son, J. H. 
Fichte, I., p. 81 ff., especially the letter of September 5, 1790. 



4 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

In this work Fichte begins with a theory of the 
moral will, on which he says the deduction of the 
nature of religion must be based. The material 
of moral action is given by impulse. But an act 
of will is the determination of one's self, with the 
consciousness of one's own spontaneous activity ; 
so that the primal impulse must be carried out 
spontaneously if there is to result free and hence 
moral action. The higher faculty of desire, the 
source of the highest impulse to action, is the 
idea of tho Absolutely Right} If the moral impulse 
is to be satisfied the moral law must govern na- 
ture. This can happen only in a Being in which 
moral necessity and absolute physical freedom 
are united. Consequently the existence of God 
is to be assumed with the same certainty as the 
moral law. In God the moral law alone rules, and 
without limitation. It follows that God is holy, 
blessed, and, in relation to the sense-world, all- 
powerful? Moreover, he must h^Just, for he must 
bring about a full congruence between morality 
and the happiness of finite, natural beings. Fur- 
ther, since, into the concept of existence, nothing 
can be thought beyond the series of causes and 
effects in the sense-world and the free decisions 
of moral beings, God must know both : the former 
since he is its author, the latter since it is the meas- 

^ Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung. Werke, V. , pp. 24, 

25. 

* Werke, V., p. 40. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 5 

ure according to which he distributes happiness to 
men ; therefore he must be all-knowing. More- 
over, the moral law has eternal validity. Eternity 
is required for God to establish the balance be- 
tween morality and happiness ; therefore God must 
h^ eternal f^ These principles are postulates of 
reason, subjective but universally valid, and the 
assumption on which they are based is an act of 
faith. Religion is founded on the idea of God as 
the determiner of nature to moral ends.^ Our 
obligation to the will of God is our obligation to 
the laws of the practical reason.^ The highest 
good is the only unconditioned absolute ^//^sT we 
know. The highest good is the supreme practi- 
cal law of reason ; and if reason in us lacks power 
in the conflict with natural inclination, by regard- 
ing the law of reason as a divine command, we 
are able to feel ourselves answerable to a Being 
who demands our deepest reverence. But to dis- 
obey the command then becomes a sin against 
the Absolute Reason. In this way the thought of 
God strengthens our reason. So, while in general 
reason must determine us to obey the will of God, 
in particular cases the will of God may determine 
us to obey reason.^ We may regard the procla- 
mation of the moral law through self-conscious- 
ness as God's proclamation of his own nature.^ 

^ Werke, V., pp. 40, 41. ^ Ibid.^ pp. 52, 53. 

'^ Ibid,, p. 51. ^ Ibid,, p. 55. 

^ Ibid., p. 61. 



5 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

This is his supernatural proclamation within us. 
He may also reveal himself in the sense-world. 
Indeed the entire system of phenomena may ap- 
pear as a revelation/ and, further, when a man or 
humanity has sunk so low that the moral laws 
given by pure reason have lost their power, a par- 
ticular fact in the world of sense may give sanc- 
tion to the moral law. The pure moral impulse 
may be specially revealed to man, when he has 
sunk into a degenerate state, through the medium 
of sense-phenomena.^ There may be cases where 
a revelation is necessary to produce moral feeling 
in a race.^ But in any case the authority of a 
revelation must not compel obedience, but only 
draw attention to the moral law.^ The criterion 
of a revelation is the correspondence of its princi- 
ples with the moral law given independently by 
practical reason. 

It is clear that the Critique of All Revelation is 
essentially Kantian, in that it derives the existence 
and attributes of God from the necessity of find- 
ing in the universe a sure footing for the realiza- 
tion of the moral law in finite beings and for the 
consummation of the union in such beings of 
happiness with virtue. On the other hand, Fichte, 
in this work, does not conceive God after the 
fashion of Kant's moral Deus ex Machina. We 
find throughout the Critique suggestions of the 

^ Werke, V. , p. 70. ^ Ibid. , pp. 91-94. 

^ Ibid., pp. 80, 81. * Ibid., p. 98. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 7 

doctrine, soon to be developed by Fichte, that the 
only reality in human experience is to be found 
in the system of interacting and morally free cen- 
tres of self-consciousness. Already morality is 
identified with the completely free action of these 
individual /'s, and God is the immanent, unify- 
ing principle of the moral universe which is con- 
stituted by the /'s. The step is already taken 
from Kant's doctrine of a transcendent ethical 
Being to an im^manent principle of ethical life. 
God may transcend the sense-world, but not the 
moral world. 

For the next six years Fichte busied himself 
with the development of the groundwork of his 
system in its general theoretical and practical 
aspects. In 1792 he lays down in his Review of 
jSnesidemus (published in the Jena Liter atur- 
Zeitung for 1794) a deed-act {That-handlung) diS the 
fundamental principle of philosophy.^ This deed- 
act is the self-creating intellectual intuition by the 
/ of itself.^ The philosophical ultimate is the 
action whereby the / intuits and so posits itself. 
To be self-conscious is to posit one's self; i.e,, to 
exist.^ The primal fact in being is action, Im 
Anfangwardie That. Starting from this primi- 

^ Werke, I., p. 8. ^ Ibid., pp. 16, 22. 

^ Professor Everett (Fichte's Science of Knowledge, p. 71) 
holds that positing {Setzen) does not primarily mean for Fichte 
creation. But the / is only by virtue of its activity as positing. 
Is not this self-creation ? 



8 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

tive deed-act of self-consciousness, by which and 
in which the latter alone is, Fichte builds up his 
Wissenschaftslehre of the year 1794. To this first 
systematic form of his philosophy belong likewise 
the two Introductions of 1797. 

The primitive act of consciousness is the asser- 
tion of its own identity. This is expressed in the 
formal proposition A is A, or A = A. The 
empirical connection asserted in a given form of 
this proposition may be false ; but the form of 
the proposition is always valid, and the bare asser- 
tion of any identity whatsoever depends on the 
identity of the /. The act of assertion itself con- 
stitutes the identity of the 1} But the proposi- 
tion A is A is only possible through the proposi- 
tion A is not not-A. In the latter proposition 
there is involved the assertion of the existence of 
a noUl, which excludes the self-identical /. To 
the / there is absolutely opposed a not-L Never- 
theless in this difference the / maintains the 
identity of its own consciousness,^ which latter 
indeed is possible only through the consciousness 
at the same time of a difference. The / is pro- 
duced by its return into itself.^ This return is an 
intellectual intuition of its own free act.^ The 
not-I is posited by the /. It is the limit set up 
by the /, in opposition and relation to which the 

^ Werke, I., pp. 91-98. ^ Ibid., p. 458. 

' Thid., p. 106 ff. ' Ihid., p. 459 ff. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 9 

/ may exercise its own conscious activity.^ The 
absolute / can be determined by nothing else.^ 
The / sets up a check or Hmit {Anstoss) to its 
own activity. Without this check there could be 
no self-determination ; without self-determination 
there could be no check, nothing objective.^ The 
check exists because the / must posit itself at 
once as finite and as infinite. Without the infinite 
there can be no limitation (finitude), and vice versa. 
Infinity and limitation are united in one and the 
same synthetic terms. The / distinguishes itself 
from its own unlimited activity. This activity 
consists in so positing itself without limitation. 
This play of the absolute / with itself, by which 
the / strives to unite opposites (the finite and the 
infinite), is the faculty of imagination {EinbiU 
dungskraft),"^ This continual play of opposites is 
the condition of the possibility of knowledge. 
Reality is the product of the imagination, which 
presents these opposites, the finite-subjective and 
the infinite-objective, for contemplation.^ 

The unceasing activity of intelligence is for 
Fichte the absolute principle of things. He says 
"' Intelligence is a constant action " {Thun),^ 

Objectivity is nothing more than the intuition 
by intelligence of its own action.'^ But how can 

^ Werke, I., p. no ff. ^ Ibid., p. 215. 

'^ Ibid., p. 119. ^ Ibid., pp. 226, 227. 

^ Ibid., p. 212. ^ Ibid., p. 440. 

^ Ibid., p. 492. 



lO MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

we be sure that this intellectual intuition is ulti- 
mate ? Faith in it, says Fichte, can be based only 
on the conviction that reason ^ is the end, person- 
ality a means. 

The absolute / is thus the one universal activity 
of intelligence underlying the system of finite 
conscious /*s. The finite / is a form of the mani- 
festation of the free activity of the Eternal Reason.^ 
In his Foundation of Natural Rights {iyg6) and the 
System of Ethics Fichte deduces the rights and 
duties of finite individuals from the general prin- 
ciples of the Science of Knowledge, In the Science 
of Rights he says that if a rational being is to posit 
itself it must be wholly self-determined, i.e,, free, 
and, if free, it must posit a sensuous world on 
which to exercise this freedom. It must ascribe a 
like freedom to others ; hence it must posit other 
rational beings. Therefore it is really the univer- 
sal or absolute /which posits itself in this whole 
system of related finite /'s. In the System of 
Ethics Fichte defines Reason, or the quality of 
being an /, as the union of subject and object.^ In 
itself the / is pure will.^ Volition is the absolute 
tendency towards the Absolute.^ It is pure activ- 
ity.^ Impulse {Trieb) is this activity determined 
in a definite direction and objectified.'^ The deter- 

^ Werke, I., p. 466. ^ Ibid., pp. 25, 26. 

"" Ibid., p. 505. ''Ibid., p. 28. 

3 Werke, IV., p. i. ^ Ibid., p. 38. 

'' Ibid., p. 105. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD n 

mination is a limitation of the /, and gives rise to 
feeling. Nature is the organic whole of impulses ; ^ 
^>., of the series of determinations of the universal 
activity of intelligence. There is no Nature-in- 
itself. My own nature and all other natures that 
are posited to explain the first nature constitute 
only a particular way of observing myself.^ 

The last statement, taken by itself, might con- 
vey the impression that the finite individual / and 
the absolute / are the same. But it is abundantly 
evident from a consideration of the Science of 
Knowledge^ the Science of Rights y and the System 
of Ethics that the absolute /is the impersonal and 
universal Intelligence which is immanent in and 
gives reality to the entire activity of the finite /'s 
in all their relations, active and passive. More- 
over, this universal / is ceaseless activity, actus 
puruSy absolute rational will. It is the only reality, 
for the sense-world has no reality in itself. Fichte's 
system is not solipsistic, but acosmistic. The idea 
of the absolute /is, when viewed from the practical 
standpoint, the idea of God.^ ^The pure /is posited 
outside ourselves, and called God. 

Now there follows a series of essays which deal 
directly with the idea of God from the standpoint 
of the Science of Knowledge. The first of these 
is entitled On the Ground of Our Faith in a Divine 

^ Werke, IV., p. JI4. ^ Ibid., p. 133. 

^ Fichte to Jacobi, August 30, 1795. Leben ti, Briefwechsel^ 
II., p. 169. See also the Review of j^nesidemus^ op, cit. 



12 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

Government of the World. This is a brief state- 
ment prefixed to an article by Forberg On the 
Definition of the Idea of Religion, in the Philosoph- 
ieal Journal {i^g^^^tdit^d by Fichte and Nietham- 
mer . Forberg in this article identified religion and 
morality. Fichte agreed with him so far as he 
went, but found it necessary to explain his own 
views, because Forberg stopped short and failed to 
draw out the implications of his position. Philos- 
ophy, our author urged, produces no facts ; it only 
explains them. The philosopher presupposes the 
fact of faith in God, and '' deduces this fact from 
the necessary procedure of every reasoning being.'' ^ 
Faith is not arbitrarily assumed, but is necessary. 
Two standpoints are possible, namely, the tran- 
scendental and that which is occupied by common 
consciousness and natural science alike. From the 
latter standpoint the sense-world is viewed as an 
absolutely self-existent whole, and every event in 
it proceeds according to its own immanent laws. 
To argue from the existence of this sense-world to 
an Intelligence who is the author of it, is to cheat 
us with empty words. All the determinations of 
this intelligence are conceptions, and how can these 
either create matter ex nihilo or modify an eternal 
matter ? From the transcendental point of view, 
there is no self-existent world, and what we see is 
only the reappearance of our own inner activity. 
From the sense-world we cannot reach in any way 

' Werke, V., p. 178. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



13 



the moral World-Order. One must seek the latter 
in the region of the supersensilous. Now, I have 
the absolute conviction or faith that I can deter- 
mine my own moral nature, which is supersensuous, 
to act in a certain way.^ I am free to set before 
myself a moral end, and ^^ I posit this end as real- 
ized in some future time/' I am convinced that 
this end will be realized. I must do this, or deny 
my own being. But it does not lie within my 
power to realize any moral end in the world. I 
can only determine myself to make the choice. 
The end is achieved only as a consequence of a 
higher law, a moral World-Order. The living and 
working moral order is God himself, and we can con- 
ceive no other.^ This moral World-Order can be 
deduced from nothing else. It is the basis of all 
objective knowledge, the ground of all certainty. 
We must not assume a particular being as cause 
of it. If we assume a particular being (Seyn) it 
must be distinguished from- ourselves and the 
world, and personality and consciousness will be 
attributed to it. It will be a finite being, a multi- 
plication of the individual, and no God, and will 
explain nothing.^ The finite cannot comprehend 
the infinite. In this moral World-Order every ra- 
tional being has a determined place, and its fate, 
so far as it results directly from its own actions, is 
the result of the World-Order. The true atheism 
is that one refuses to hearken to the voice of his 

^ Werke, V., p. 183, ^ Ibid., p. 186. ^Ibid., p. 187. 



14 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

conscience.^ Fichte closes his article with two 
quotations, which he says express his own views. 
The first of these is the well-known passage in 
Faust, beginning 

" Who dare express Him ? 

And who profess Him, 

Saying, I believe in Him ! 

Who, feeling, seeing, 

Deny His Being," etc.'^ 

The second, from Schiller's Worte des Glaubens, is 
as follows : 

** And God is ! — a holy Will that abides, 

Though the human will may falter ; 
High over both Space and Time it rides, 

The high Thought that will never alter: 
And while all things in change eternal roll, 
It endures, through change, a motionless soul."^ 

This statement of his position brought against 
him the accusation of atheism. In the Appeal to 
the Public against the Charge of Atheism y and the 
Judicial A nswer to the Charge of A theism, he further 
develops his own doctrine in contrast with that of 
his accusers. He contends that his opponents re- 
gard God as a particular substance. Substance 
means with them *^ a sensible being existing in time 
and space." This God, extended in time and space, 
they deduce from the sense-world. Fichte claims 
that extension or corporeality cannot be predi- 

* Werke, V., p. 185. ^ Faust, part I., scene xvi. 

^ Merivale's translation, quoted in Smith's Memoir y p. 96. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 15 

cated of the Deity.^ The sensuous world is only 
the reappearance of the supersensuous or moral 
world through our attempt to grasp the latter by 
means of our sensuous faculty of presentation. 
The sensuous is mere appearance, and can furnish 
no ground for the existence of God. The Deity 
is not to be understood as the underlying ground 
of phenomena, for, so conceived, he is made a 
corporeal substrate.^ He is an order of events, 
not a substance. The sensuous predicate of 
existence is not to be applied to him, for the 
supersensuous God alone is. He is not dead 
Being (Sej/n)y but rather pure action, the life and 
principle of the supersensuous World-Order.^ His 
opponents, continue Fichte, deduce all relations 
of the Godhead to us from a knowledge of God 
got independently of these relations. Our author 
denies the validity of their procedure, and main- 
tains that the relation of the Godhead to us as 
moral beings is immediately given.^ He repeats 
the statement that God as moral World-Order is 
postulated as guaranteeing the realization of the 
end which the man of good disposition sets before 
himself. He regards God, taken in such a sense, 
as being quite as immxcdiately certain as our own 
existence. Duty cannot be done absolutely with- 
out reference to an end, for in that case it would 
be without content. Man must act with regard to 

^ IVerke, V., p. 258. ^ /did., p. 261. 

^ Ibid., p. 263. '* Ibid., p. 214. 



l6 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

an end, and this end is blessedness, not enjoyment. 
God as moral World-Order makes it possible that 
this end be realized. On the other hand, the end 
which his opponents set before themselves is en- 
joyment. Their God who dispenses enjoyment 
is a material existence, a prince of this world. ^ 
Eudaemonism in morals is allied with dogmatism in 
speculation. To characterize God as a spirit is of 
negative value in distinguishing him from things 
material.2 It gives us no positive information, 
for we know as little wherein the being of a spirit 
consists as wherein the being of God consists. 
Inasmuch as all our thinking is limiting, God is 
inconceivable.^ To determine him is to make him 
finite. If personality and consciousness are to be 
denied of God, it is only in the sense in which we 
conceive ourselves as personal and conscious.^ 
God is a wider consciousness than we are, a pure 
intelligence, spiritual Hfe and actuality. He is 
neither one nor many, neither man nor spirit. 
Such predicates belong only to finite beings. 
Again, God's existence cannot be proved. Not 
from the sense-world, for Fichte's system is acos- 
mistic. Not from the supersensuous world, for 
proof implies mediation. The supersensuous 
World-Order is God, and is immediately perceived 
through the inner sense.^ 

' Werke, V., p. 218. ^ Ibid., p. 264. 

"" Ibid,, p. 265. 4 Ibid, p. 266. 

* Ibid., p. 268. 



riCHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



17 



In Reminiscences^ Answers, and Questions, written 
in 1799, but not published until after his death, 
Fichte emphatically asserts that speculation does 
not produce the idea of God. Life is higher than 
knowledge.! Speculation is only the means of 
knowing Life.^ All certainty is based on immediate 
feeling, and God exists in the immediacy of our 
felt life.^ Philosophy has to do only with a con- 
cept of the idea of God.^ The expression "' order 
of a supersensuous world '' has been misappre- 
hended. It is not to be understood " as if the 
supersensuous world were, before it had order, 
and as if order were thus but an accident of that 
world. On the contrary, that world only becomes 
a world by being ordered."^ The philosopher is 
not concerned with the actual significance of God 
for religion, but only with the logical significance 
for philosophy. Faith in the moral World-Order 
is belief in a ^' principle by virtue of which every 
determination of the will through duty assuredly 
effects the promotion of the object of reason in 
the universal connection of things." ^ This in- 
volves the presupposition that the world of reason 
is created, maintained, and governed by this prin- 
ciple.'^ This principle or World-Order is Activ- 
ity, not dead Permanency. It is a living being, 

^ Werkg, v., p. 352. * Ibid,, p. 348. 

^ Ibid,, p. 342. ^ Ibid., p. 361. 

^ Ibid., pp. 348, 356. ^ Ibid., pp. 363-4. 

"^ Ibid., p. 366. 



I8 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

*' creating, maintaining, governing." Inasmuch as 
these predicates are asserted of one principle, 
when we reflect we must think a permanent sub- 
strate to which these belong and which unites the 
different predicates. The oneness is mediate ; the 
predicates arise immediately. The one principle 
can only be thought of '' as a, for itself, existing 
and working principle,'' ^ as pure Spirit, as Creator, 
Maintainer, and Governor, But this thinking is 
an abstraction Abstractly the principle of the 
world is a logical subject. Concrete thinking 
gives us God as Activity, as the Creating, Main- 
taining, Governing, etc. '* The conception of 
God cannot be determined by categories of exist- 
ence, but only by predicates of an activity/' ^ 

In the Vocation of Man, published in 1800, God 
is characterized as the living holy Will in whom 
we live and move and have our being. He reveals 
himself in the heart, and is comprehended by 
faith. He is best known to the simple child-like 
mind. Faith in duty is faith in God. My will is 
apart of two orders, the spiritual and the sensuous. 
The law or order of the supersensuous world is the 
Infinite Will. I unite myself with this by making 
my will conform to it. The voice of conscience, 
of freedom, in my breast commands me to do this. 
The Infinite Will unites me with all other finite 
wills in a world or system of many individuals. 
The union and direct reciprocal action of many 

1 Werke, V., p. 368. ^ jj^^^^^ ^^ ^yi. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



19 



separate and independent wills is the world. What 
the Infinite is in himself, no finite being can say. 
As the finite mind conceives it, he is self-existing, 
self-manifesting Will. 

It had been asserted that Fichte's doctrine of 
God was pantheism, that in his theory finite 
beings are the constituent parts of the moral 
world, and that our relation to one another is the 
World-Order. Fichte deals with this charge in 
"From a private letter,'* published in the Philo- 
sophical Journal in 1800. His opponents, he says, 
understand by order something dead, fixed, and 
ready-made. Their order consists of a manifold of 
things lying beside and following one another 
{Ordo ordinatus). He, on the contrary, under- 
stands by order an active, working principle [Ordo 
ordina7ts). In all human actions, two things are 
reckoned, a determination of the individual's will 
and something independent of his will, by which 
a consequence follows his willing. So in morality, 
if A stand for the determination of the will to an 
end, and B for that principle through which there 
comes about a consequence necessarily connected 
with A, then the law of the connection of A and 
B in the moral order of things is the moral World- 
Order, and is outside of, and independent of, finite 
moral beings. 

Fichte now found it necessary to correct the 
misunderstanding that his absolute / was the same 
as the finite individual /. In the Sun-Clear Report 



20 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

to the Larger Public (1801) he makes plain the 
distinction.^ It may have been this misinterpre- 
tation which led him, in the Exposition of the 
Science of Knowledge of the year 1801, to change 
his terminology. In place of the absolute / there 
now appears the absolute Act of Knowifig {Wis- 
sen) as the starting-point for the deduction of the 
theoretical and practical worlds. This Absolute 
Knowing is characterized in the same manner as 
the absolute /. Knowing is a being in and for it- 
self and a dwelling in and disposing of itself.^ It is 
the absolute interpenetration of Being and Free- 
dom? It is the fusion of the unifying and the dis- 
persive tendencies of thought into an identity.^ 
Knowing is the intellectual intuition of the Abso- 
lute, and this is Spirit. In the universe there is 
no death, no lifeless material, but rather only 
Life, Spirit, Intelligence.^ In this exposition the 
word being {Seyn) is used to designate absolute 
knowing. In the Science of Knowledge of 1804^ 
being and thought are identified. Fichte had 
formerly denied the applicability of the predi- 
cate being {Seyn) to God on the ground that 
it was a sensuous concept and denoted some- 
thing dead and fixed, whereas God is pure ac- 
tivity. It has been maintained by some that 
the introduction of the word being into these 

^ Werke, II., p. 382. * Ibid., p. 22. 

^ Ibid,, p. 19. ^ Ibid., p. 35. 

^ Ibid., p. 19. ® Nachgelassene Werke, II. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 21 

later expositions marks the change to an en- 
tirely new view on Fichte's part — to an Eleatic 
conception of the Absolute as a motionless, in- 
active Unity. But this interpretation overlooks 
the fact that Fichte describes knowing in the ex- 
position of 1801 diXid thinking {Denken) in that of 
1804 alike in terms of activity. In a letter to Schel- 
ling, dated August 7, 180 1, he says that being is not 
compression, but is through and through alertness 
{Agilitdt)y pellucidity, light.^ God is this pure be- 
ing. He is the inconceivable real ground of the 
separateness of individuals and the ideal bond of 
all.2 He is inconceivable in himself, and we can only 
say that the Absolute is the Absolute.^ The Science 
of Knowledge expounds the universal consciousness 
of the whole spiritual world. Every individual is 
the rational square of an irrational root, and the 
whole spiritual world is the rational square of an 
irrational root — the immanent Light or God.^ 
The essence of philosophy lies in conceiving the 
inconceivable.^ 

We have traced through the preceding works 
the gradual clarification of Fichte's thought on 
the nature of God and his relation to the world 
of appearance. It becomes evident in the later 
utterances that the absolute Act of Knowing or 

^ Leben u» Brief wechsel, II., p. 345. ^ Ibid., pp. 344-5. 

^ To Schelling, January 15, 1802. Leben u, Briefwechsel, II., 
p. 367. 

* Ibid,, p. 345. ^ Ibid., I., p. 181. 



22 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

the Universal Consciousness^ which is identical with 
the absolute / of the earlier Science of Knowledge, 
is not the Divine Being in his fulness, but a never- 
ceasing expression of his Being. God manifests 
himself, but he is not exhausted in his manifesta- 
tions. 

3. Fichtes Later Views, 

In his writings between the years 1806 and 181 3 
Fichte gives, from various starting-points, his doc- 
trine of the Divine Nature in itself and in its 
relation to the phenomenal world. 

In the Characteristics of the Present Age (1806) 
he says that Humanity is the one, outer, forceful, 
living, and self-dependent Existence {Daseyn) of 
God, or the " one utterance and outflow of the 
same.*' "' Humanity is an eternal ray, that divides 
itself into individuals, not in very truth, but only 
in the earthly appearance." ^ The true destiny of 
humanity is to return to God, and universal his- 
tory is divided into five epochs which mark the five 
great stages of the progress of humanity towards 
its goal.^ In a corresponding manner, Fichte gives, 
in the Way to the Blessed Life (1806), the five pos- 
sible ways of viewing the infinite. These mark 
the stages in the progress of the individual soul 
Godwards.^ The first and lowest is when the 
world is seen through the outer senses and this 

^ Werke, VII., p. i88. ^ Ibid,, pp. ii ff. 

«/^/'^., V.,pp. 465 if. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 23 

world is held to be the true world. In the second 
the world is comprehended as a law of order and 
equality existing in a system of rational beings. 
The practical reason of Kant represents this view. 
The third view is that from the standpoint of the 
higher morality. Here the highest plane of being 
is a law for the spirit, but a creative law whose 
end is to make men revelations of the inner divine 
Being.^ Here the truly Real is the Holy, Good, 
and Beautiful. The fourth view is that of religion. 
This is the clear knowledge that the Holy, Good, 
and Beautiful are the manifestations in us of the 
inner Being of God.^ It is seen that in whatever 
the holy man does, lives, and loves, God appears 
in his own immediate forceful Life. The fifth 
and highest view is the standpoint of pure knowl- 
edge.^ To point the way to the pure knowledge of 
the one Absolute Being which is complete in itself 
is the purpose of the Way to the Blessed Life. 

The Absolute is Being.^ The fundamental Being 
of Life is an unchangeable intuition. Being neces- 
sarily appears as '^ existence,'' which is, hence, the 
phenomenal form of the inner essence of Being.^ 
Existence is Life — the absolute concept which 
breaks itself up into finite /'s.^ The absolute con- 
cept appears only in the individual consciousness.'^ 

' Werke, V., p. 469. ^ Ibid., p. 508 ; II., p. 682. 

^ Ibid., p. 470. ^ Ibid., p. 510 ff. 

^ Ibid,, p. 472. " Nachgelassene Werke, III., p. 36. 

''Ibid., p. 69 ff. 



24 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

The absolute concept itself is the appearance of 
God as the latter comprehends itself.^ This self- 
comprehension posits hfe.2 Life comes to con- 
sciousness in individuals as absolute thinking 
{Denken),^ This appearance is the accident of 
which God is the substance. The self-intuition 
of Being in its own manifestation brings forth, as 
a free act, a process. Through this process the 
manifold /'s arise. ^ The universal and absolute 
thought brings forth, by thinking, a community 
of individuals.^ But in this manifold appearance 
existence is still One Spirit, which intuits and under- 
stands itself as a system of many.^ The purpose 
of the infinite manifoldness of existence is to ex- 
press Being in Becoming.*^ This process of expres- 
sion is eternal. The power of the absolute Life 
to create individuals is never exhausted in the 
forms of individuality. To all eternity Being 
continues to be broken up into individuals.^ 
Hence the ethical purpose in the manifestation of 
the Divine Being in individuals is never fully 
revealed.^ Perhaps, in the Moral Order, one 
world-age is conditioned by another, and so there 
takes place in greater purity a progressive revela- 
tion of the goal. The individuals arise through 

' NachgelasseneWerke I., p. 408. ^Werke, II., pp. 603, 608. 
^ Ibid., p. 412. ® Nachgelassene Werke^ p. 526. 

^ Werke, II., pp. 608-10. '' Werke, II., p. 683. 

* Nachgelassene Werke, I., p. 548. ^ Ibid,, V., p. 530. 
"" Ibid,, XL, pp. 666, 667. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 25 

thinking, but God does not. On the contrary, 
through his Being thinking first arises.^ The in- 
dividuals are but pictures of the Absolute. Beyond 
his appearance God exists in the absolute form of 
Being? 

The reflection or splitting up of the Divine 
Being brings forth free and self-dependent /'s. 
Freedom is the root of existence and the sole 
organic point of unity for the various forms of 
the Absolute Being.^ Through freedom the in- 
dividual rises to those higher stages on the road 
to union with the Absolute which have already 
been mentioned. To become one with God the 
finite individual must freely deny his own exist- 
ence, and then he sinks in God.^ The inner being 
of an individual as it appears in his actions will 
have value only in so far as it is the appearance 
of God in this individual.^ 

Fichte had repeatedly said that the Absolute-in- 
himself was the inconceivable. But with the lapse 
of years his religious feelings had enlarged and 
deepened, and while in the Way to the Blessed 
Life the highest standpoint is still that of knowl- 
edge ( Wissen)j this offers a direct relation to God 
in the form of an intellectual intuition {intellec- 
tuelle Anschauung)^ an experience which is deeper 
than conception {Begreifen). This direct relation- 

^ Nachgelassene Werke^ I., p. 563. ^Werke^ V., p. 513. 

^ Ibid. ^ Ibid,, pp. 517, 518. 

"" Ibid., p. 536. 



26 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

ship is love. The love of God causes Being and ex- 
istence, God and man, to melt and flow together.^ 

Love is the fountain of all certainty and all 
truth and all reality. Love is higher than reason. 
It furnishes the primal element for the creation 
of the world.^ In reflection that has become 
Divine Love, and denied itself in God there is 
attained the standpoint of knowledge.^ In the 
beginning, higher than all time, and absolute 
creator of Time is Love, and the Love is in God, 
for it is God's self-maintenance of himself in 
existence.^ 

'* In so far as man is the love of God he is and 
continues to be God."^ In a letter to Jacobi (of 
May 8, 1806) Fichte says: ''Raise thyself by 
Love above the concept, then by so doing thou 
art immediately within formless and pure Being.''^ 

Fichte expresses very clearly the final outcome 
of his thought in two sonnets,*^ from which we 
quote : 

*' The perennial One 
Lives in my life and seeth in my sight." 

" Naught is but God — and God is only life ! 
And yet thou seest and I see with thee, 
How then could such a thing as seeing be 
Were it not a knowing of God's own Life ? 

^Werke, V., p. 540. ^ Ibid., p. 543. 
'^ Ibid,, p. 541. ^ Ibid., p. 543. 

^ Ibid., p. 542. ® leben u. Briefwechsel, II., p. 179. 

^ Nachgelassene Werke, III., pp. 347-8. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 27 

* How gladly to His would I my life resign ! 

But oh ! how find it ? Whensoe'er it flow 

Into my knowing, transformed to empty show, 

'Tis mixed with other semblance, in this hull of mine.* 

Tis clear, what hath the hindrance been. 

It is thyself! Whate'er can die, resign ! 

And in thy life shall God live evermore. 

Note well what in this dying shall live o'er, 

Then shall the hull as naught but hull be seen. 

And thou shalt see unveiled the life divine ! " 

4. Conclusion, 

When we put together what Fichte said at 
different times and from various points of view 
his doctrine becomes a unity and his thought 
exhibits a consistent development. He always 
conceived God as immanent in the moral universe 
— the only universe which he recognized. He 
consistently held that the human mind could not 
conceive God in his transcendence. But he did not 
deny that transcendence, and indeed in his later 
writings he emphasized it by his doctrine of the 
Absolute Being. While in his innermost nature 
he is beyond the reach of thought, God manifests 
himself eternally as Active Intelligence or Will, 
and by the free act of his own intelligence man 
can rise to an intuitive knowledge of God and 
enter into union with him. In the earlier form 
of the Science of Knowledge the Absolute / is the 
expression of God. In the final form which 
his philosophy assumes Fichte emphasizes the 



28 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

doctrine that God is more than the Absolute /. 
The idea of God is more fully defined. Beyond 
his manifestation of himself he exists as Absolute 
Being. He alone is. But this Being is not an 
abstract motionless One. Fichte says again and 
again in the Way to the Blessed Life that the 
nature of Being is to manifest itself, that it is ever 
active, ever living and loving. "^ Being and Life 
are one and the same.'' '' The Divine is think- 
ing and living in one organic unity." Being be- 
comes conscious of itself in Existence {Daseyn), 
The universal form in which the Divine Essence 
appears is Knowing {Wissen), the Concept, Free- 
dom, and these are all equivalent expressions. 
Knowing is the first image or schema of the 
Divine Being.^ We have not yet reached self- 
consciousness. But free Knowing or the Concept 
understands or becomes conscious of itself in Life, 
and Life appears in the multiplicity of finite, self- 
conscious individuals. Consciousness in these is 
the reflex of real Being.^ We humans are thus 
appearances, images^ of God's true being. In us 
his ceaselessly outflowing, living Will concentrates 

^ Werke, IV., pp. 386, 387, etc., and Nachgelassene Werke, I., 
p. 413 ff. 

'' Ibii., III., p. 35. 

^ There are thus three stages in the process of God*s imaging 
{Bilde7i) or schematizing himself : (i) Appearance {Erscheinung), 
Knowing ( IVtssen), or the Concept which is Freedom ; (2) Life 
or Thinking {Denken) ; (3) the Self -understanding of Life {Sich- 
verstehen), i,e.^ the individual /'s. 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



29 



itself into innumerable centres of consciousness. 
But all individuals are enclosed in the one great 
unity of the pure Spirit.^ The real and true 
appearance, like God, whose appearance it is, is 
above the actual {Uberwirklich).^ 

Consciousness involves a limit, and hence is a 
reflex of real Being, not God himself. Deeper 
than all finite life, higher than all conscious thought, 
there abides at the heart of things the pure super- 
conscious Intelligence, the absolutely realized Will 
which is the rest of absolute motion, the fruition 
of absolute, self-centred activity. God is the in- 
telligent Will that is ever active in forming itself 
into finite self-conscious wills. But in this eternal 
manifestation he never exists in his fulness. He 
is beyond the limits which human will and intelli- 
gence involve. In himself he cannot be a self- 
conscious being such as we are, for he transcends 
the limitations and eternally overcomes the op- 
positions through which in us self-consciousness 
arises. But he is accessible to us as the goal of our 
free striving. In the immediacy of ethical feeling 
or love, we penetrate, by way of that self-renuncia- 
tion which is the realization of freedom, the shell 
of outward conscious existence and touch the 
Divine Being himself. For this Divine Being is 
above, not below, our conscious life. God remains 
in the last period of Fichte's thought the ethical 
Absolute, the source and the end of the moral life. 

^ Werke^ I., p. 416. '^ Nachgelassene Werke, I., p. 423. 



30 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 



The free ethical will still is, for him, the key to our 
own existence. God is still held up as the goal of 
the active life. But at this period Fichte empha- 
sizes the doctrine that the ethical Absolute is not 
a mere moral ideal, '' a far-off Divine Event," but 
now and ever is in all its fulness, and can be 
experienced directly by him who wills to, in the 
ethically determined feeling or intuition of love. 
Fichte does not theoretically deduce the finite / 
from the Absolute. Nor is there on the purely 
theoretical side of his philosophy any path that 
leads inevitably from the finite / to God. The / 
is active through impulse (Trieb) and against an 
obstacle or limit {Anstoss), Fichte makes a show 
of deducing the not-I from the /, but what he 
really does is, by an analysis of the activity 
of the /, to reveal the not-I as the indispensa- 
ble condition of this activity. Theoretically, 
God is simply the hypostatized abstraction of 
cognition in general. It is in the practical or ethi- 
cal life that Fichte finds the point of closest con- 
tact and union of the finite / with the Absolute. 
The ultimate reason for the existence of a limit to 
the / is the development of free ethical activity 
by the finite self. Through the action of freedom 
the finite / strives to overcome this limit, and 
finally, having through opposition found its own 
vocation, it transcends the limit and becomes one 
with God. The finite self has then discovered, 
beneath the antitheses of itself and its world, the 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 31 

unifying principle of the Divine Life. The con- 
sciousness of this Divine Life, interpenetrating the 
lives of finite selves, grows more inclusive and 
pervading with the growth of Fichte^s thought. 
He asserts in many of his earlier writings the abso- 
lute power of man as a free being to raise himself 
to God, but later he assumes the powerlessness of 
the human will to unite with God without the aid 
and presence of the Divine Will. " Through him- 
self man can do nothing. He can not make him- 
self moral, but he must wait until the divine 
image breaks forth in him.'* ^ Fichte never specifi- 
cally faces the problem of evil and offers no ex- 
planation of its place in his system. 

In the system Being and Becoming are perhaps 
not fully reconciled. But can they ever be wholly 
reconciled by other than the way of poetic meta- 
phor ? It is my opinion that no profounder contri- 
bution to the solution of this eternal problem, and 
none that meets better the ^/>^/^^/ demands of hu- 
man nature, has been made than by Fichte in his 
doctrine that the ceaseless activity of finite wills, 
considered as a system, is the manifestation in the 
world of time and space of the infinite Life of 
God, and that in their spontaneous, self-determined 
activity the world-system of finite I's expresses 
and realizes, each one fragmentarily but not the 
less truly and unceasingly, the completion and 
perfection of the Absolute Life. 

^ Nachgelassene V/erke^ III., pp. 45, 114, etc. 



32 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

Fichte prepared the way for Hegel's Logic by 
his analysis of the dialectic movement of self-con- 
sciousness and for the Phenomenology of the 
Spirit by his doctrine of the five stages of indi- 
vidual and racial consciousness. But in his own 
conception of the movement of self-consciousness 
he failed to get beyond the Spinozistic principle 
that all determination is limitation, and therefore 
involves finitude. He cannot conceive any self- 
consciousness as arising without an external limit 
or check which the / strikes against and recoils 
from, and so kindles into self-consciousness. He 
ceaselessly pursues the limit and tries to get it 
into his Absolute. But he only succeeds in so 
doing by expelling self-consciousness from the 
Absolute. He cannot avoid doing this, for there 
clings to his thinking the ancient prejudice of the 
abstract reason that the Absolute and Infinite 
must be abstract and indeterminate if it is to be 
all-inclusive and self-sufficient, and of course self- 
consciousness must be determinate. Again and 
again, in trying to conceive the unity of God in 
relation to the manifoldness of finite /'s, Fichte 
speaks of the Absolute as going out of itself into 
the finite individuals in order to return into its 
own being. In his later writings, indeed, he em- 
phasizes the repose of the Absolute or God in his 
own nature. But the return of the Divine Being 
from the multipHcity of his finite manifestations is 
no true return, and has no unity unless there is in 



FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



33 



God a self-consciousness which knows and feels 
itself as such in relation to finite individuals. The 
ceaseless play of the Absolute Intelligence in its 
outgoing into the universe of free men is meaning- 
less, and the existence of such a universe is mean- 
ingless, too, unless there is in God an immediate 
and absolute consciousness of himself as a unity 
in relation to the manifold forms of his manifesta- 
tion. Fichte's own strong sense of the ethical 
significance of the universe of moral selves and 
his conception of love as the meeting-point of 
man and God involve necessarily the self-conscious- 
ness of God in himself. There is no real unity in 
the universe outside the unity of the Divine Con- 
sciousness. Fichte failed to see that self-conscious- 
ness is essentially a unity that differentiates itself, 
but does not lose itself in these differences. On 
the contrary, it maintains and expresses in differ- 
ences, in a multiplicity of finite selves, the con- 
crete fulness of its own life. This is precisely the 
sort of unity that Fichte has in mind in his later 
writings, but he does not see^ clearly in what way 
it is shadowed forth in consciousness. It is true 
that this unity is not felt by ourselves in all its 
fulness. It remains an ideal, but an ideal which 
is implicated in every fibre of the actual life of the 
human self. 

From the whole of Fichte's writings there stands 
out clearly the firm, unfaltering conviction that 
outside the world of spirits there is nothing real. 
3 



34 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 



His ethical idealism develops into a mysticism 
which yet retains the ethical vigor and elevation 
that breathed through his earlier utterances. His 
unio mystica is the immanent ideal of the ethical 
life. The universe is a system of moral beings 
whose vocation is to express in individual form 
the transcendent Divine Life which is the im- 
manent process of their own realization of blessed- 
ness. In his ethical idealism Fichte is the true 
successor of Kant. In his grasp on the imma- 
nency of the Divine Life in the ethical striving of 
humanity he goes beyond his master. In his 
union of moralism and mysticism Fichte has made 
a permanent contribution to the philosophy of re- 
ligion, and his thought will live on in the meta- 
physics of the future. 



CHAPTER II. 

Kegel's conception of god. 

I. Introductory General Notions, 

Hegel's Philosophy of Religion begins with the 
thought of God, which is the result, he says, of 
the other parts of his philosophy. But God is at 
the same time the Prius that eternally manifests 
itself. He is the result only in the sense of being 
the goal of philosophy. There are three stages in 
the movement of philosophy towards truth : first, 
the logical, or stage of pure thinking ; second, 
nature ; third, finite spirit. From finite spirit we 
move upward to God, who is the last result of 
philosophy. *'' The result is the absolute truth.*' 
** The last becomes the first." ^ 

God is thus at once the presupposition and the 
goal of all Hegel's thinking. *^ A reason-derived 
knowledge of God is the highest problem of 
philosophy." ^ God is for him the self-condition- 
ing, self-centred totality of all that is, Le,y the 
ultimate unity. But philosophy must not remain 

* Werkcy XI., p. 48. N.B. — The references are to the Philoso^ 
phie der Religion in the first edition (Berlin, 1883-4). 
^ Wallace, The Logic of Hegel, p. 73. 



36 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

standing with the bare assertion that God is the 
ultimate unity. It must specify (bestimmen) this 
unity and exhibit it as a concrete system of differ- 
ences. ^^ Philosophy knows God essentially as 
concrete, spiritual, real universality, that is not 
grudging but communicates himself." ^ The dif- 
ferent parts of Hegel's system are expositions of 
different aspects of God's existence. Taken to- 
gether, they exhibit the development in that pro- 
cess of concretion or specification {Bestimmung) 
which it is the task of philosophy to show forth, 
as Hegel is always telling us. 

Logic, the first part of the philosophy, is a 
criticism of the categories by which men interpret 
reality.^ Truth, for Hegel, is not the correspon- 
dence of thought with external reality. He has 
no interest in, and would condemn as utterly 
fruitless, the attempt to determine the objective 
validity of thought. Truth for him is ^^ the agree- 
ment of a thought-content with itself,"^ />., self- 
consistency. This definition must constantly be 
borne in mind, inasmuch as the entire work of the 
Logic consists in passing in review the ascending 
series of categories in the light of which men in- 
terpret reality. Each succeeding category is found 
inadequate, because it does not square at all 
points with the idea of self-consistency. A given 
form of conceiving reality can define itself only in 

^ Werke, XII., pp. 287, 447. 

^ Wallace, op. cit., pp. 30-59. ^ Ibid.^ p. 52. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



37 



relation to other forms which differ from it. The 
full development of their differences seem to set 
these forms of thought in mutual contradiction ; 
but, on further consideration, they turn out to be 
complementary aspects of a more comprehensive 
unity of thought. For example, the Notion of 
Being is defined by reference to its opposite — 
Becoming. These notions seem absolutely in- 
compatible. But in determinate Being, i.e., in 
definite existence, we have Being which has come 
to be somewhat and is becoming something else. 
Under the three heads of '* Being,'' *' Essence," 
and "Notion '' the inevitable movement of thought 
is traced from the most abstract to the most con- 
crete conception of things. Each category bears 
within itself the seeds of its own decay, and in the 
dialectic process, which pervades the life of 
thought as well as the life of nature, it merges 
itself into a more comprehensive category. When 
the ultimate category of the " Notion " is reached, 
into it all the lower categories are received, and by 
it they are fulfilled. The Logic is an immanent 
criticism of categories.^ 

But these categories are not to be, for a mo- 
ment, conceived as hanging in the air or merely 
going on in the philosopher's head. They reflect 
in the mirror of pure thought the true nature of 
the objective world. If all the categories up to 
the final Idea of the Notion have to deny them- 

* A, Seth, Hegeliaiiism and Personality^ p. 91. 



38 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

selves and be absorbed by their own children this 
is so precisely because in the world of actuality 
everything finite is passing away, is suffering death 
and rebirth in a higher form. The Idea which is 
the end of the Notions life does not so pass away. 
It was from the beginning ; without the Idea was 
not anything made that was made. The Hegelian 
Logic aims to reflect the ebb and flow of cosmic 
and human evolution — to paint in the gray colors 
of thought's conceptions all the struggle and the 
passion of historic humanity. 

Inasmuch as men have always used the highest 
categories of their thinking to interpret and give 
unity to their experience, logic may be regarded 
as the history of the different thought-forms in 
which men have given expression to their concep- 
tions of that ultimate reality which supplies the 
unity of experience, i,e,^ God. " Logic is metaphys- 
ical theology, which considers the evolution of 
the idea of God in the ether of pure thought.*' ^ 
Hegel's philosophy is preeminently a philosophy 
based on experience. But experience means for 
him chiefly the experience of the race in thinking 
out the world problem. He seeks his material 
chiefly in the history of human thought. Cate- 
gories are objective thoughts,^ i,e.j thoughts re- 
garded as objectively true, as universally valid. 
So Hegel says : '^ Logic . . . therefore coincides 
with Metaphysics, the science of things set and 

^ Werke, XII., p. 366. ^ Wallace, op. cit., p. 45. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



39 



held in thoughts — thought accredited able to 
express the essential reality of things." ^ 

The Logic is a genetic history of Metaphysics. 
Its work is to bring to light the ground thoughts 
of metaphysics, and to show their evolution. It 
has been said, " There is no evolution possible of 
a fact from a conception.'' ^ There is possible, 
however, an evolution in the conception of a fact. 
The HegeHan Logic is, I take it, the evolution of 
the conceptions of isolated facts into their ulti- 
mate implication — the conception of God. Hegel 
thinks that the conception of God is attained in 
logical science as the Absolute Idea — the Notion 
or Totality of Being comprehending itself. He 
says that the Logic sets forth the self-movement 
of the Absolute Idea as the original Word or Self- 
expression. He believes that in the Logic he is 
tracing the actual course of God's manifestation 
of himself through human thought about him. 
Hegel has no doubt that he has discovered, and 
is setting forth, the process by which the Abso- 
lute manifests itself in the appearances of our 
time and space world. The absolute method which 
is his method gets at the very heart of the object, 
he would say. The absolute method, being the 
immanent principle and soul of its object, develops 
the qualities of that object out of the object itself. 
This method Hegel unhesitatingly applied to the 
ultimate Object. The dialectic of thought is for 

^ Wallace, op. cit., p. 45. ^ Seth, op. cit., p. 125. 



40 MOD.ERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

him the dialectic of Being. The final category is 
the idea of God regarded in the light of pure 
thought. It is the Notion {Begriff), or End. 
Hegel's '' Notion *' corresponds to the Final Cause 
of Aristotle, in which are included both the efifi- 
cient and the formal cause. ''In the End the 
Notion has entered on free existence and has a 
being of its own by means of the negation of im- 
mediate objectivity." ^ The category of End takes 
up into itself mechanism and chemism as subordi- 
nate categories. The End is not merely blind 
causation like the efficient cause.^ In having a 
being of its own, End has properly subjectivity 
and is really self-consciousness abstractly consid- 
ered. As subjective, End implies a matter exter- 
nal to itself on which it works. We have so far 
only external design. This is superseded in the 
notion of inner design, of reason immanent in the 
world.^ The true End is the unity of the subjec- 
tive and objective.^ The End exists and is active 
in the world. It constitutes the world. Individ- 
ual existences have their being only in the univer- 
sal End. " The Good, the absolutely Good is 
eternally accomplishing itself in the world.'' ^ The 
End as actual is the Idea. '' The Idea may be 
called Reason (and this is the proper philosophi- 
cal significance of ' reason '), subject-object, the 
unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and 

' Wallace, op. ciU, p. 343. * Ibid., p. 344. 

^ Ibid., p. 345. ^ Ibid., p. 351. ^ Ibid., p. 352. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 41 

the infinite, of soul and body," ^ etc. The Idea 
is a process which is ever splitting itself into dif- 
ferences, but always preserves its relation to self. 
Hegel seeks to throw forth on the philosophical 
screen a vivid picture of the Absolute at work, 
weaving a world of men and things in the '' loom 
of time." The first form of the Idea is Hfe. Life 
is the Idea existing in the world as external and 
immediately given. From life we rise to Cogni- 
tion. Here the subjective Idea stands over against 
the objective world that is given. In the process 
of Cognition^ the subjective Idea starts out with 
faith in the rationality of the objective world and 
seeks to know it, i.e., to realize its own unity with 
the objective. But the subjective Idea does not 
merely seek to hww the objective world. It also 
seeks to realize its own ideals in the objective 
world.^ This is the effort of will toward the 
Good. The subjective never quite succeeds in 
bending the objective to its purposes, and it is 
forced to fall back on the faith *' that the good is 
radically and really achieved in the world." ^ 
This faith is the speculative or absolute Idea. Its 
object is the '' Idea as such/'^ and for it the ob- 
jective is Idea. The Absolute Idea is the self- 
identity which contains the whole system of con- 
crete things and persons as integral parts of itself. 

' Wallace, cj>, city p. 355- ' ^^^'^m P- 37i. 

^Ibid.,y. 363. * Ibid,,^. 373. 

^ Ibid. 



42 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

It is the absolutely Good and absolutely True. It 
is not a mere abstract universal, but is rather the 
all-embracing, self-centred unity of things. The 
Universal realizes itself by determining itself to 
be the Absolute Individual, the Absolute Subject. 
Every step that the Absolute Idea takes in going 
beyond itself is at the same time a reflection into 
itself, an enrichment of self. The greater exten- 
sion brings the higher intension. The highest, 
most acute point in the development is pure Per- 
sonality, or absolute Subjectivity. This, through 
the completion of the absolute dialectic which is 
its own nature in expression, grasps and holds all 
in itself, and is conscious of its own unity amidst 
all the changing details of its world. We have 
reached the notion of God. Hegel uses the same 
phrase, '' the Absolute Idea," to represent both 
our thought and the object of that thought. This 
double use has led to the charge that Hegel at- 
tempted to construct the real world out of abstract 
thought. The double use is in a measure justifi- 
able, since the Absolute Idea as the ultimate 
existence is really the divine self-consciousness. 
From Hegel's point of view, it is the divine in us 
that enables us to grasp the Idea. Hegel ana- 
lyzes the notion of self-consciousness and puts it 
forward with courageous anthropomorphism as 
the ultimate explanation of the universe.^ He 
admits no duaHsm in the realm of consciousness. 

^ See Stirling, TAe Secret of Hegel, I., p. 239. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 43 

Underneath his double use of the word ''Idea" 
lies the assumption that thought can fathom the 
depths of the divine activity in the world. Taken 
by itself this phraseology would support the view 
that God has no existence outside the process of 
human thought, and that he reaches self-conscious- 
ness only in the highest forms of human conscious- 
ness. We shall discuss later in what sense this 
is true of Hegel's thought. 

But the Idea is the reverse of abstract thought. 
It is the most concrete reality. It is the Tk\o<i. 
'* As the beginning was the universal, so the re- 
sult is the individual concrete subject." ''The 
universal is only a moment in the Notion." The 
concrete Idea is not an abstraction. It is rather 
the complete reality. It is this individual and 
comprehensive character of the Absolute Idea 
which enables us to see that it is much more than 
mere thought. The Idea takes up into itself all 
the wealth of the subjective and the objective 
worlds. It holds together in one unity all the 
contradictions of human thought and passion. 
The Absolute Idea is not less but more than the 
rich and thronging world of human experience. 
It is all this because it is the one Absolute Indi- 
vidual. To forget this is to overlook what lies at 
the heart of Hegel's thinking. 

Until the Idea is reached in the Logic, we have 
untrue categories. The Idea alone is true, Le,, 
adequate to the reahty, because itself the most 



44 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

concrete reality. It is the unity of thinking and 
being, in which both are not merged in a higher 
existence, but thinking is regarded as the highest 
form of being, embracing all lower forms. The 
Idea is the reahzed Notion {Begriff), The real- 
ized Notion is the complete individual. *^ The 
Notion is not merely soul, but rather free sub- 
jective Notion that exists for itself and there- 
fore has personality — the practical objective No- 
tion, determined for itself, that as person is im- 
penetrable atomic subjectivity — that is equally 
not exclusive Individuality, but rather is for 
itself Universality and Knowledge, and in its 
Other has its own objectivity for object."^ The 
highest point reached by the dialectic method is 
the richest and most concrete. It includes in itself 
all the other stages of the dialectic movement, 
and thus becomes pure subjectivity or person- 
ality. 

In the Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, and the 
Philosophy of Spirit are presented the three stages 
of the dialectic movement of Hegel's philosophy. 
The Logic lays the groundwork in pure thought. 
The other works fill in the details. In the final 
stage we reach absolute personality or absolute 
spirit, which is the most concrete fact, for it in- 
cludes all the other facts. The Absolute Spirit 
is the Whole and the True. It is the ultimate 

' Werke, V., p. 318. N. B.— The references are to the Logik, 
in the second edition (Berlin, 1841). 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 45 

being upon which all finite being depends for its 
existence. 

It has been thought that Hegel, in making a 
passage from the Absolute Idea of the Logic to 
nature, attempted to construct the real world out 
of abstract thought. It seems to me that what 
he really tries to do is to preserve the absolute 
coherence of his system, by showing that the in- 
ner necessity of the Idea demands that the Idea 
be discovered in nature. This was a presupposi- 
tion of the dialectic method. If the latter, in 
very truth, reflects reality, then the movement of 
thought must be shown to repeat itself in concrete 
form in the world of nature. If nature be not an 
irreducible and wholly refractory element in the 
totality of the Divine Idea, then it must be shown 
how the Idea becomes nature. If nature were not 
the free, because self-determined, expression of 
the Idea, then from nature we should never be 
able to get back to the unity and repose of the 
Divine Idea in the perfection of its wholeness. 
Nature would be an unreconciled factor in the 
universe. So the transition from Logic to Nature 
is essential, not only to the dialectic movement of 
the philosopher's thought, but to the unity of the 
Absolute Idea in the eternity of its movement. 
The starting-point for interpreting the natural 
world is the Idea as end, concrete totality,^ sub- 
jectivity which includes objectivity. In its appli- 

^ Wallace, op. cit,, p. 378. 



46 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

cation to the spheres of nature and spirit the Idea 
seems to receive more concrete determinations 
than it receives in the Logic. Nevertheless the 
Idea in its most concrete form as Absolute Spirit 
has been the presupposition throughout. In the 
Philosophy of Religion, God appears as spirit, and 
nature is his self-externaHzation. Although Hegel 
does not construct the world out of abstract 
thought, he does deprive it of independent exist- 
ence. It is but an aspect of the life of the Abso- 
lute Spirit. This brings us to the consideration 
of the nature of God as set forth in the Philosophy 
of Religion. 

2. The Full Expression of Hegel s Conception of 
God in the '' Philosophy of Religion!^ 

Hegel criticises the theology of the Enlighten- 
ment {Aufkldrung) very sharply, on the ground 
that it empties the thought of God of all content 
and makes him a mere unknown being beyond 
the world.^ The task of philosophy, he says, is to 
know God. '' Philosophy has the end to know the 
truth, to know God, for he is absolute truth, and 
in contrast to God and his explication, nothing 
else is worth the trouble of knowing.*' ^ It knows 
*^ God essentially as concrete, spiritual, real Uni- 
versality."^ 

The Enlightenment does not get beyond the ab- 

' Werke, XII., pp. 280-1. "" Ibid., p. 287. ^ Ibid. 



HEGEUS CONCEPTION OF GOD 47 

stract categories of the understanding {Ver stand). 
The understanding makes distinctions, such as 
finite and infinite, absolute and relative, and then 
lets these distinctions harden into oppositions. He 
criticises Jacobi's opposition of Cognition {Erken- 
nen), as discursive and finite, to the immediate 
knowledge {unmittelbare Wzssen) of God. Imme- 
diate knowledge tells us only t/iat God is, not 
w/iat he is.i But if God is not an empty Being 
beyond the stars, he must be present in the com- 
munion of human spirits, and, in his relation to 
these, he is the One Spirit who pervades reahty 
and thought. Hence there can be no final separa- 
tion between our immediate consciousness of him 
and our mediated knowledge of reality.^ The 
oppositions of. mediated thought are overcome 
from the standpoint of r tdison {Vernun/f).^ When 
v/e look with the eye of reason we perceive that 
the infinite includes the finite. God is the Absolute 
Idea, a circle that returns upon itself, not a straight 
line projected indefinitely. He contains the world 
of nature and finite spirits as differences within 
himself. God is to be conceived as the unity of all 
that is. He is the universe, the " concrete totality.'* 
God is the absolutely necessary being in relation 
to whom contingent things have no being. 

The nature of this being must be further deter- 
mined. To say simply that God is the identity 
of all that is, is to make him a mere universal, a 

» H^erke, XI., p. 45. ' /did., p. 48. '/did, pp. 102-57. 



48 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

substance.^ We must not rest satisfied with a bare 
identity. On the other hand, we must define God 
in his objectivity or universality. To say with 
Schleiermacher that God is known immediately in 
feeling is true but trivial.^ This immediate con- 
sciousness of God must be mediated. To say that 
he is known only in feeling is to reduce him to a 
mere subjective experience of the empirical indi- 
vidual. When the empirical self has the higher 
religious feelings of repentance, sorrow, thankful- 
ness, and, finally, love, it reaches the consciousness 
of identity with the universal.^ But this progress 
of feeling towards universality is produced not by 
feeling itself, but by the rationality of its content.^ 
Feeling in itself is mere particularity. It is the 
private and transient state of the mere em- 
pirical self.^ From it no definition of God can be 
reached. 

With a world of concrete differences on his 
hands, with finite nature and finite spirits before 
him, Hegel seeks for a definition of the Absolute 
which will allow it to take up all these differences 
into itself and still maintain its own unity. He 
finds the principle he seeks in self-consciousness or 
spirit. All things become moments of the Divine 
Self-consciousness, constituent elements of the 
Absolute Spirit. '' God is spirit, the absolute spirit, 
the eternal, simple essential spirit that exists with 

' ^erke, XI., pp. 53, 56, etc. » Ibid,, p. 125 ff. 
''Ibid,, p. 115. ^ Ibid,, p. 133. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 49 

itself." '' It belongs to God to distinguish himself 
from himself, to be object to himself, but in this 
distinction to be absolutely identical with himself 
— Spirit." 1 Spirit is spirit only as manifesting 
itself. '' Spirit that does not appear is not." 2 " God 
is a living God who is real and active." ^ '' A God 
who does not manifest himself is an abstraction." ^ 
It is the very nature of God to manifest himself.^ 
The finite worlds of nature and spirit are manifes- 
tations of him,^ and he is the concrete totaHty of 
these manifestations.*^ God is the beginning and 
the end of the world-process. The logical Idea is 
the potential being of God, the abysmal nature 
from which all things proceed. But the primal 
ground of things never for an instant remains a 
dark abyss. From it eternally proceeds a world 
which is its objectified expression, and in relation 
to which God is spirit, is self-conscious subject. 
Nature, finite spirit, the entire world of conscious- 
ness, intelligence and will are embodiments of the 
divine Idea. But they are so far prodigal sons. 
In religion do these errant children first become 
reconciled with the Divine Father. It is the busi- 
ness of the philosophy of religion to show how this 
reconciliation is accomplished.^ 

In immediate knowledge or faith, God is object 

^ IVerke, XIL,p. 151. '/did., p. 134. 

» /did,, XI., p. 18. ' /did., p. 18. 

^ Idzd,, p. 24. "^ Idzd, XII., pp. i89-9< 

^Idid., p. 135. ^/dtd., XI., p. 27 ff 
4 



)0. 



50 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

for the finite spirit.^ For faith he is not a mere 
totality, but rather a being to whom the finite spirit 
stands in relation.^ God appears as Object in the 
form of representation {Vorstellung)? It is the 
task of philosophy to exhibit in the form of reason 
that which exists in the common mind in the form 
of representation. Philosophy and common-sense 
correspond in content ; they differ only in their 
manner of conceiving the same fact.^ We have the 
logical conception of God as unity, as totality of 
the finite, as manifesting himself in the finite world. 
We have also the religious representation of him 
as objective to the finite spirit. These two views 
of God must be unified and exhibited as equally 
necessary aspects of God's being. This is done 
in a representational {vorstellende) pictorial fashion 
in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. '' The Trin- 
ity is the determination of God as Spirit. Spirit 
without this determination is an empty word.''^ 

The three aspects of God's being are treated 
respectively under '' the realm of the Father," 
'' the realm of the Son," '' the realm of the Spirit." 
God is the absolute eternal Idea who exists under 
these aspects. The absolute Idea^ is, in the first 
place, God in and for himself, in his eternity, before 
the creation of the world, beyond the world. In 

^ Werke, XI., pp. 63-64 ff. 

* The content or object is God, who is present at first in the 
form of inner intuition {A^tschauung). 

' ^^r>(v, XI.,pp. 14-15 ff. */^?^.,p. 22. V^iV.,XII., p. 177. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 51 

the second place it is the creation of the world. 
This created world, this other being, divides itself 
into two parts, physical nature and finite spirit. 
Created being at first appears as external to God, 
as having existence independent of him. God 
reconciles it with himself, and w^e have, in the third 
place, the process of reconciliation. In this process 
the spirit, which as finite was cut off from the 
divine Spirit, returns to unity with the divine. 
The third aspect of God's being is the first enriched 
by union of the second with it. These three aspects 
are not external differences, but differentiations of 
one individual. The one spirit is regarded in these 
three forms or elements.^ Each element involves 
the other two.^ Any one element by itself is an 
abstraction and reaHzes its true being only through 
the other elements. 

The first element is spaceless and timeless. It 
is God in his self-existence. It is the unity which 
preserves its oneness amidst change. In the second 
element or aspect, God enters the world of space 
and time, the world of nature and the human spirit. 
It is God's manifestation of himself in space and 
time. The first step in the dialectic of the divine 
life is the non4emporal act by which from the 
abysmal depths of his being God eternally brings 
forth a world of finite things and finite spirits. 

^ Werke, XII., pp. 177-9- 

2 The Idea is the divine self-revelation in these three forms. 

{Ibid , p. I79-) 



52 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

The everlasting process of the world of experience 
is a dialectic movement of birth and death and 
rebirth. But the process is upward. It is pervaded 
by the Divine Idea, impelled by an End that is, 
while yet the goal, forever realized, and therefore 
can never faint or grow weary. The movement 
of the world is a return to the Divine Father. But 
this return can be real only if the Father has for- 
ever dwelt in the world. That he has so dwelt is 
the insight of religion. The full consciousness of 
his immanence is the realization of the absolute 
unity of man and God. Other religions strive for 
this. Christianity attains it in its doctrine of the 
God-Man. But the perfect unity of God and man is 
attainable only if the Father has been ever with man, 
bearing the burden and heat of man's life on earth 
and sharing in all the passion of his history. To 
pain and struggle and death in man corresponds 
the principle of negativity in God. He negates 
himself that there may be a world, and in this 
world which is struggling to overcome negation 
he dwells forever. The principle of negativity or 
death is an essential moment in the life of God. 
In the suffering and death of the God-Man is 
manifested the utter immanence of God in the 
world, his invincible presence in the dialectic of 
history. In the life and death of Jesus Christ 
there was presented at a particular point in time 
the full representation of the timeless Hfe of God.^ 

^Werke, XII., p. 287 if. 



HEGEUS CONCEPTION OF GOD 



53 



But negation is not the last word. Death is fol- 
lowed by resurrection. Negation is itself negatived. 
The circle completes itself. The element of nega- 
tivity is taken up into the positive element, which 
is Spirit. The Spirit which is present in the com- 
munity is the realm of the reconciliation of the 
finite world to God. It is God as totality. The 
last becomes the first. The Spirit is the Father, 
and man, in whom the spirit is become conscious, 
is a mediate element or moment in the Divine 
Life.^ The fulfilment of life is the perfection of 
subjectivity.^ In nature God is present only in an 
external fashion. Man, on the contrary, rises to 
the consciousness of his unity with God and of 
the presence of the divine life in himself.^ In the 
third sphere, that of the Spirit, we have God, 
nature, and man comprehended in their unity. God 
is the '-' concrete universal " which sets up a differ- 
ence that is nevertheless '* only ideal and is imme- 
diately aboHshed." ^ As Spirit he is the perfect 
Individuality which arises by the return of the 
Particular (nature and finite spirit) to the bosom 
of the Universal Father. The whole process, in 
which the Father sends out of his own depths the 
world of things and men only to recall them to 
himself, is the divine History? In its wholeness 
this divine history is timeless. The three aspects 

^ Werke, XII., pp. 240, 312. ^ Ibid., pp. 267-8. 

""Ibid,, pp. 284, 322. ''Ibid,, p. 190. 

^ Ibid,, p. 219. 



54 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

of it can be characterized in relation to the forms 
of human experience. Viewed in relation to human 
consciousness in general, the first aspect is the 
element of pure thought, the second that of repre- 
sentation ( F^r^/^///^;/^), and the third is subjectivity 
as such. The latter in its unanalyzed wholeness 
is soul, heart, or feehng, but when it knows itself it 
is thinking Reason. 

Defined in relation to space, the three phases 
of the divine history are respectively outside the 
world, within the world, and in the spirit of the 
church, which is at once planted in space and 
reaches to the spaceless Heaven of the Father. 
Defined in relation to time, the three phases are 
respectively — God as the eternal Idea, timeless in 
reference to a world of change ; God as having 
appeared in the past, as the properly historical 
manifestation in the earthly sense ; and, thirdly, 
God as present in the communion of the church. 
The latter is limited. It must be reconciled with 
the timeless Spirit. '' The Spirit which disperses 
itself into finite flashes of light in the individual 
consciousness must again gather itself together 
out of this finitude.'' '' Out of the fermentation 
of finitude, as it transmutes itself into foam, there 
rises the exhalation of spirit." ^ 

We have in \}i\^ Philosophy of Religion the fuller 
development of the Absolute Idea, with which the 
Logic culminates, expressed in terms of religious 

' Werke, XII., p. 330. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 55 

thinking. In neither work is God a mere cate- 
gory. It is plain that the Absolute Idea, which is 
the unity that returns to itself from difference, or, 
to express the same thought differently, the self 
that maintains itself amid change, is identical with 
God as unfolded in the Philosophy of Religion. 
God is the ground thought of Hegel's system. 
But Hegel tells us that the Absolute Idea does 
not mean quite the same as God.^ The term 
'' God " carries here the meaning that it has for 
finite spirits contemplating him. It refers to God 
as he is present in rehgious devotion. God is ob- 
ject to man's faith in the form of representation 
{Vorstellung). Religion always presents God in 
the form of representation. As he exists in re- 
ligion, God is wholly objective in relation to man, 
hence not the Absolute. The Absolute Idea is 
the comprehensive unity of God and man. Never- 
theless the Absolute Idea is God speculatively 
considered. As a mere object to man's thought, 
God would be a finite individual entering into rela- 
tion with other finite individuals. His individual 
character would thus be defective. God is not 
merely objective to man. Man has his being in 
God. God is at once the source from which the 
finite individual springs, and the ground of the 
relation through which, in its dependence, the 
finite individual reaches out to, and realizes itself 
in, the absolute individual. Finite selves are true 

^ Werke, XI., p. 16. 



56 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

only because they belong to the infinite self. 
Therefore, metaphysically, God and the Absolute 
are one. We have seen above that God, meta- 
physically regarded, is the unity which differenti- 
ates itself into nature and man, and yet remains 
identical with itself. When man sees himself and 
nature as contained in this unity, and feels himself 
to be at one with the unity, he has reached abso- 
lute knowledge. He has attained the metaphysical 
determination of God. He lives in the kingdom 
of the spirit. 

What is the relation of God as the central unity 
to his content, the world-process ? God as self- 
related unity is not in time or in space, and yet 
the process of the world is an essential element of 
God's being. Hegel would say that the central 
unity and the world-process are both abstractions. 
Therefore it is fruitless to talk about their rela- 
tions. God is both. They seem to contradict each 
other, but this apparent contradiction is a pulse of 
the divine Life. 

The meaning of the world-process is further de- 
veloped in the Philosophy of History, "The des- 
tiny of the spiritual world, and — since this is the 
substantial world, while the physical remains sub- 
ordinate to it, or, in the language of speculation, 
has no truth as against the spiritual — the final 
cause of the world at large we allege to be the 
consciousness of its own freedom on the part of 
the spirit and ipso facto the reality of that free- 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 57 

dom." 1 Freedom is the Idea of Spirit. In the 
development of the world this freedom is at first 
impHcit and unactuaHzed. All the struggles of 
nations and individuals are stepping-stones by 
which men rise to freedom. Men began with the 
belief that one man only was free, the king, and 
have risen to the belief that all men are free. 

Hegel says that the Spirit realizes itself in time 
and that the idea of spirit is the end of history. 
''Spirit" is used here in the generic sense. The 
Absolute Spirit realizes itself in history, but as 
eternal; it is at every moment completely real. 
It does not wait until the end of time to attain 
fruition. History, Hegel says, is the theatre of the 
unceasing strife and reconciliation of the Absolute 
Spirit and the finite individual. The former con- 
tinually overrules the purposes of men in order 
that they may realize their true destiny — freedom. 
God is immanent in the world, directs the world^s 
history towards the development of freedom. 
God himself does not develop. Men are the sub- 
jects of historical development. The divine Idea 
realizes its purpose in history through the realiza- 
tion of human freedom. The concrete individuals 
have a place, not in themselves, but as realizing 
the divine purpose. On the other hand, the divine 
Idea has no meaning apart from the concrete indi- 
viduals in which it finds expression. 

It has been asserted that in the consideration 

^ Philosophy of History, p. 20 (translated by Sibree). 



58 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

of the time-process of the finite world God as 
completed self-consciousness disappears, and that 
he appears only as subject of the historical devel- 
opment. It is true that, in the specific considera- 
tion of the time-process, which is one aspect of 
God, the aspect of him as eternally complete real- 
ity does not come forward prominently. Hegel 
would say that this abstraction is necessary for 
the purposes of exposition, but that it is not true. 
The truth is that eternity and the time-process 
belong together. God is not a mere subject of 
the historical development, yet the historical de- 
velopment is necessary to his selfhood. For God 
is the unity of all that is. The objection is made, 
however, that Hegel makes no passage from the 
notion of God as eternal, self-related unity to the 
facts of the finite world. ^ Here, again, Hegel 
would answer that only the abstract understand- 
ing would ask for such a passage, and that the 
demand is fruitless. His system is an attempt to 
give unity to the facts of the time and space 
world. The facts by their incompleteness demand 
the unity, and they depend upon that unity for 
their existence. By his construction of the Trin- 
ity, Hegel seeks to provide a place for the facts of 
the finite world in his conception of God. The 
phrases drawn from the conception of the Trinity 
are used in a metaphorical way. The three spheres 
of Father, Son, and Spirit express the three mo- 
^ By A. Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, Lecture 6. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 59 

ments in the relation of the eternal and the time- 
process. God as eternally complete is the eternal- 
in-itself, being-in-itself. But being-in-itself could 
never exist by itself. God must manifest himself 
in the finite world. The eternal must appear in the 
time-process. This is being-for-self. But by itself 
being-for-self, that is, being which goes outside it- 
self, is unreal. The eternal and the temporal must 
exist together. This existence together, being in 
and for self, the unity of the Father and the Son, 
of God and the World, exists in the realm of the 
Spirit. The Spirit is the sphere of reason, or, as 
we might put it, of constructive imagination that 
unites and holds together contradictions. In the 
Spirit we see God, nature, and ourselves in unity. 
The third element returns to the first. We recog- 
nize ourselves as contained in God. 

But how are we to think together an eternal 
Unity and the flux of becoming? If change is an 
essential moment in existence and God in himself 
does not change, what does change mean in rela- 
tion to him? How can God's history be timeless 
if man's history, which is for himself real and 
breathing with passion, has any significance for 
God ? If man's Hfe is an element in the divine 
Life, then the latter, sharing as it does in the 
time-process of the world, suffers imperfection. 
Does not imperfection then become a moment in 
the divine Life ? Does it not mar the divine per- 
fection ? Does it not disturb the eternal repose 



6o MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

of God ? Hegel's answer to the first of these 
questions is yes ! to the other two, no ! Hegel 
holds firmly to the repose of perfection and to the 
restlessness of imperfection as necessary and com- 
plementary aspects of experience. 

The experience of the real flux of events presses 
too insistently on the philosopher to permit of his 
taking refuge in a merely static world. On the 
other hand, the instinct of thought, the thirst for 
completeness impels him to seek a unity. In 
what way shall he best express this unity that 
persists amidst change as the permanent law of 
change ? How shall he conceive the perfect being 
without denying the progress of the imperfect 
world ? In self-consciousness, which is ever in 
movement but retains its self-identity, which pro- 
ceeds outward and gathers the concrete details of 
the world into itself, which absorbs and assimilates 
what at first seems external to it, Hegel finds the 
principle which best enables him to adumbrate 
the nature of the totality of things — God. , He 
analyzes with keen insight the Self which, always 
reaching beyond itself and ever involved in contra- 
dictions, yet never loses itself and never succumbs 
to these contradictions. He appHes the principle 
of selfhood to all the '' tangled facts of experience.'' 

The all-essential quality of self or spirit is, for 
Hegel, 'its inevitable tendency to find its own life 
in its other. The richness and perfection of self- 
hood are proportionate to the degree in which it 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 6l 

finds itself in that apparent other which is never- 
theless only the wealth of its own potential being 
projected outward. The sterner the struggle the 
greater the victory. The deepest pain gives fullest 
joy. Spirit can comprehend itself only in infinite 
opposition.! So the Eternal Spirit realizes itself 
only through negation of self. The principle of 
negativity is woven into the very texture of being. 
Time, Space, Evil, Imperfection, are but forms of 
appearance of this principle of negativity. Y^! 
through it only truth and freedom, the highest 
attributes of Spirit, themselves come to be.^ The 
dialectic process is a never-ceasing moment of life. 
" He that loseth his life shall save it.'* 

Hegel's so-called followers of the Left have in- 
terpreted his conception of God as that of an 
impersonal Absolute which develops itself in the 
world-process, comes to consciousness first in man, 
and reaches perfection only in the greatest man. 
If the Logic only were in evidence, the interpre- 
tatioii might be justifiable. Such passages as : 
" Spirit, in so far as it is the Spirit of God, is not 
a Spirit beyond the stars," " God is present every- 
where and in all spirits," ^ have been interpreted in 
this way. What these passages actually testify to 
is a belief in God's living presence in the world. 
To say that " man feels and knows God in him- 
self "^ is not to say that God has no conscious 

^ Werke, XII., p. 212. ' Ibid., XI., p. 24. 

''Ibid., p. 208. ''Ibid., p. 37. 



62 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

existence apart from this individual feeling. The 
passage which would give strongest support to 
the view taken by the Hegelians of the Left is 
perhaps this : '' Religion is knowledge by the 
Divine Spirit of itself through the mediation of 
finite spirit." ^ This statement is perfectly con- 
sistent with tRe idea of God as objective to every 
man. Finite spirit is an integral part of God's 
being. Man is God as " other." But God does 
not lose his identity in this difference. ^' Spirit is 
spirit /(?r itself."^ ^^ We say God produces eter- 
nally his son (the world). God distinguishes him- 
self from himself, ... Ave must know well that 
God is this whole act. He is the beginning, the 
end, and the totality." ^ Nevertheless the process 
is nothing but a play of self-conservation, self- 
assertion.* God can be said to be conscious of 
himself in the religious man since he is immanent 
in man, and in religion this divine immanence 
comes to consciousness. God knows himself in 
man only as man knows himself in God. The 
divine immanence is not a dead fixture, but a 
living spiritual process. Man is indeed essential 
to God's being. The Hegelians of the Left em- 
phasize this aspect of the system and neglect 
entirely the aspect in which God is regarded as 
eternally completed self-consciousness. 

That God could never exist as conscious spirit 

' Werke, XI., p. 129. ^ j^-^^^ y^^^ ^ ^^ ^g^^ 

"" Ibid., p. 13. ^ Ibid., p. 199. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 63 

without a world as objective to his thought is a 
legitimate inference from Hegel's system. But 
the further inference that therefore God had no 
conscious existence before the development of 
man on this planet is wholly unwarranted. In 
his self-diremption into the object of his own con- 
sciousness God is as truly eternal as in the abys- 
mal depths of the Idea which is the father of all 
things. According to Hegel there was no time 
when a world did not exist for the divine thought. 
The principle of negativity is an eternal attribute 
of the divine Nature. Hence it is irrelevant to 
Hegel's system to speak of a point in time when 
God did not exist in the fulness of being. It is 
equally irrelevant to speak of a time when the 
world, considered as a moment in the divine Life, 
began to be. Spirit is the logical prius of the 
whole theory, but Spirit defines itself through all 
eternity in a system of differences. 

Hegel is sometimes criticised for using the word 
'' spirit " without qualification '' to designate both 
God and man." He used the word in this way 
because with him "■ spirit " was the meeting-point 
of the divine and the human. But " spirit " is no 
abstraction. Hegel was keenly conscious of the 
necessity of doing justice to the concrete detail 
with which the world confronts philosophy. His 
theory of the concrete universal, Le,, the indi- 
vidual, is an attempt to meet the difficulty. For 
Hegel the individual is the real, but there is only 



64 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

one real individual, namely, God. In the Philos- 
ophy of Religion God is described in the realm of 
the Spirit as the complete unity which takes up 
the other two aspects into itself. '' This third 
realm is the Idea in its determination of individu- 
ality." ^ Some critics think that the tendency of 
Hegel's thought is to make God an impersonal 
unity. Hegel's incessant naming of God as Idea 
lends color to this view. His vice is over-intel- 
lectualism. But an impersonal Absolute would 
leave no place for religion, and Hegel maintains 
in his system the reality of religion. He tells us 
that the Philosophy of Religion has the task to 
convert what is present pictorially to the mind of 
the common man into terms of thought.^ He says 
that the opposition of believing and knowing is a 
false one. In believing or immediate knowing 
{unmittelbares Wissen) there is present in the form 
of feeling what is present in cognizing (jEr^^//;/^;^) ^ 
in the form of thought. In his lectures on the 
proofs for God's existence, he seeks, not to show 
that these proofs are adequate, but that they are 
means by which the human spirit elevates itself to 
God.^ He talks quite in the Pauline vein of '' the 
witness of the spirit to the spirit in man's knowing 
God." The relation of man to God is " the relation 
of spirit to spirit." ^ At the conclusion of the Phi- 
losophy of Religion he tells us that the '' end of these 

' Werke, XII., p. 257 ff. ' Ibid., XL, pp. 14-5. 

' Ibid,, p. 64 ff. * Ibid., XII., p. 301. ^ Ibid., XI., p. 60. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



65 



lectures is to reconcile science and religion.** 1 His 
designation of God as Idea is only the logical 
aspect of his theory of God. In his works deal- 
ing with the concrete world, God is called the 
Absolute Spirit. We have seen that God is essen- 
tially individuality, and that Hegel regards per- 
sonality as the richest and most concrete being, 
including all differences in itself. Hegel charac- 
terizes the Absolute Idea and Personality in simi- 
lar terms. The Absolute Idea contains in itself 
as essential moments the facts of the finite world. 
But in the finite world finite spirits are the true 
realities over against material things. God is the 
Absolute Spirit, the supreme self in whom finite 
spirits live and move and have their being. If 
God is not personal as we know personality, it is 
because he is super-personal. In terms of feeling 
God may be defined as Love — as a play of differ- 
entiation, together with the feeling of the unity 
which dwells in the differences. 

The question has been raised as to whether 
Hegel's God is not better described as a society 
than as a single person.^ Now, Hegel's God is 
certainly not an individual spirit existing in single 
blessedness apart from all the contents of his uni- 
verse. He therefore is not a single person in the 
sense in which we are individuals.^ But he is for- 

^ Werke, XII., p. 288. 

' By Mr. McTaggart, Mind, N. S., VI., p. 575- 
3 Werke, XI., p. 66. 
5 



66 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

ever the unity of the society of individual finite 
spirits. In him the scattered rays of Hght which 
issue from the multitude of finite selves converge 
to a single point — to the unstained purity and 
translucency of an absolute self-consciousness. 
God, then, is the unity of spirits. The society 
of finite individuals exists as the object of his 
thought. Without them his Life would be blind. 
Without him they would be chaos and anarchy 
and naught. 

In brief, God, in Hegers philosophy, is the 
universal self-consciousness which comprehends 
within itself all concrete differences, men and 
things. " God is a Spirit in his own concrete 
differences, of which every finite spirit is one."^ 
Man truly knows God when he sees nature and 
himself as manifestations of God, and recognizes 
himself as the highest of these manifestations, 
capable of grasping in thought the whole of which 
he is a part.^ 

It has been doubted whether there is any place 
in Hegel's system for individuals. It seems to me 
that the most insistent note in HegeFs writings is 
the emphasis on the concrete individual. He never 
wearies of attacking abstractions like '' being " and 
** substance." The movement of the Logic is 

^ Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, II., p. 579. 

'See Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religio7i, II., p. 95. After 
reaching this conclusion I find myself confirmed in it by Pro- 
fessor Pfleiderer. 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 



67 



towards the category of individuality. The Phu 
losophy of History makes the freedom of the in- 
dividual the goal of history. Hegel maintains 
that the moral, ethical, religious aspect of human 
individuals is an end in itself. This aspect in in- 
dividuals is " inherently eternal and divine.'' ^ But 
the individuality of the Logic is the absolute, all- 
comprehensive self. The freedom of the human 
individual exists only where individuality is recog- 
nized as having its real and positive existence in 
the Divine Being.^ The Philosophy of Religion is 
the presentation of an Absolute Individual, a unity 
in difference, a self-related system in which infinite 
individuals are at home when they know them- 
selves as dependent on the whole organism, which 
is God. To speak in concrete terms, in Hegel's 
thought man has no existence in himself. He is 
real only as he knows himself in God. To know 
himself so is man's true destiny. But, on the 
other hand, God exists only as he knows him- 
self in man. To separate the finite and the infinite 
individual is to destroy both, according to Hegel. 
The finite individual is but a moment in the 
Absolute, but he is none the less essential to the 
Hfe of the Absolute. But, it must be admitted, 
Hegel does not recognize the value of individ- 
uality in itself. He does not seem to allov/ 
any interior life to the human person. He speaks 
as if the whole nature of the individual were 
* Philosophy of History, pp. 34-5. "^ /^^'^m P- 53. 



68 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

exhausted in his relations to society, church, 
and state. Uniqueness in a person seems to 
be, for him, pathological. Corresponding to his 
disparagement of individuality is Hegel's depre- 
ciation of feeling. This, he holds, gets its sig- 
nificance entirely from thought. In itself it 
is that which we possess in common with the 
animals. 

3. Conclusion. 

Finally, what is to be said of this magnificent 
attempt to interpret the whole sphere of being in 
the light of a self-conscious principle of rationality? 
It must be said, I think, that the attempt fails to 
accomplish all that was aimed at. The aim of 
the system is to show that reality is rational 
through and through. But the contingent detail 
of experience proves too refractory for Hegel, and 
he is forced to admit that all the facts cannot 
be rationalized. In other words, his absolutism 
breaks down. The vice of this absolutism con- 
sists in the tendency to identify the ultimate 
reality with the time-process. 

The key to the relation of the two factors is 
found in the dialectic method. In his appHcation 
of this method Hegel has shown that all the 
forms of finite thought, such as the notion of 
separate individual things, of mechanical causality 
conceived as final, etc., are infected with the germs 
of decay. The knowledge which these finite cate- 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 69 

gories give is mediated. The process of media- 
tion goes relentlessly forward until the categories 
of common-sense and scientific thought find repose 
in the Spirit or Idea. This is the final reality. In 
Spirit the dialectic movement is transcended. It 
is true that, inasmuch as the march of common- 
sense and positive science was the march of the 
Spirit homeward, the dialectic belongs to the nature 
of spirit. But in the Absolute Spirit it is set at rest. 
The process of mediation has ended in a higher 
immediacy. If Absolute Spirit has been really 
reached mediation is transcended in the vision 
of reality, and the dialectic of philosophy has 
achieved its euthanasia. So long as the dialectic 
is in process spirit is not present in its perfection. 
Hegel is fond of calling the dialectic process the 
thing itself, the very reahty of life {die Sache 
selbst). The method, he says, is the soul and 
substance, the absolute might and highest im- 
pulse of reason itself.^ Now, a movement must 
be of something. A process, however essential to 
that which proceeds, must be from some state 
of being through some forms of existence and 
towards a definite goal. According to Hegel, 
Spirit is the starting-point, the way, and the ter- 
minus of the dialectic process. If this be so, then 
spirit cannot be adequately expressed as a mere 
evolutionary process. It may absorb the process, 
but in its own finality it ceases to be a process, and 

* Werke, V., pp. 320, 321, etc. 



70 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

never was simply that and nothing more. Hegel 
has to admit this conclusion. Then philosophy, as 
he conceives it, has not grasped the fulness of 
Spirit. It has not exhausted the nature of sub- 
jectivity. When the process is ended, being and 
becoming, the infinite and the finite, the absolute 
and the relative, holiness and imperfection are no 
longer united by the negativity of the dialectic 
itself, but in an experience which has ceased to be 
philosophy, since the dialectic has been set at rest 
and the power of the negative has been overcome. 
It does not seem, then, that philosophy can claim 
superiority of insight to art and religion. For in 
the latter the struggle of contradiction, which 
separates spirit from the immediacy of existence, 
is laid at rest. The knowledge of the Absolute 
must be an immediate experience which tran- 
scends negation, and is not a mere incomplete 
process of overcoming opposition. 

Such an experience perhaps comes only through 
the higher unity of feeling as an immediate con- 
sciousness. Hegel, I have said, depreciated feel- 
ing and heaped contempt on the finite individual 
as a centre of unique feeling. The Hegelian sys- 
tem sought to reveal the warp and woof of the 
universe, and not merely to show us the pattern of 
that part of the fabric on which we are figures, 
but to lift the screen and reveal the Great Weaver 
sitting at the loom. The fabric woven by Hegel 
is made up so entirely of intellectual threads that 



HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD 71 

it fails to represent fairly our world with its com- 
plex constituents. The system is one-sidedly 
intellectuaHstic. Hegel has marked some of the 
saHent features of self-consciousness or personality. 
His terms (^^ in itself," ^^ for itself," ^Mn and for 
itself") are abstract expressions for the ceaseless 
movement of the human soul, for our life with its 
cravings, its desires, and its satisfactions, which 
seem to follow one another in a never-ending 
spiral movement. Our mental life is a ceaseless 
movement of outgoing to the object and return 
to self. But in his own application of subjectivity 
as the key to the riddle of existence, he over- 
looks entirely the place of feeling in the life of 
the self. He calls the highest form of subjectivity 
thinking reason, and this he regards as essentially 
active, that is, as including will. Hegel's thinking 
reason is cognition-volition. But the impulse of 
will lies in feeling, and the goal of will is an imme- 
diate state of feeling. Cognition can never ade- 
quately reflect the life of the subject. It is im- 
personal. Conation or volition, which arises from 
the union of cognition and feehng, is the expres- 
sion of the personal Hfe. Feeling gives unity to 
both cognition and voHtion. Hegel did violence 
to experience by overlooking the significance of 
feeling and volition in the life of the self. This 
oversight gives ground for the view that his phi- 
losophy is a one-sided system of micre logical ideal- 
ism, a very inadequate interpretation of the nature 



72 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

of man. The same oversight is responsible for 
Hegel's absolutism and his bUndness to the 
uniqueness of personality. But what could one 
expect from the official philosopher of the Prus- 
sian bureaucracy? 

Hegel was too sure of the similarity of divine 
and human thought (particularly his own thought). 
He carries his anthropomorphism too far. There 
may be forms and conditions of being of which 
we have never dreamt. It is useless and mis- 
chievous to assume that God exhausts his nature 
by his manifestations on our planet. We should 
hesitate before '' transferring to God all the features 
of our own self-consciousness." 

Hegel's great quality as a philosopher is his faith 
in the rationality of the world. He stands as a 
splendid example, worthy to be followed by all 
who would ask questions of the universe. He 
inspires us with the confidence that such ques- 
tions in some way will be answered. His highest 
philosophical achievement consists in his insight 
into the apparent contradictions of life. He sees 
clearly that the development, not only of thought, 
but of the spirit of the race and of the individual 
spirit, is a process of growth into greater fulness 
and concreteness of Hfe through struggle, suffer- 
ing and decay. He sees that ** Die to live '* is 
everywhere the law of existence. Contradictions 
belong to the heart of things. But they do not 
destroy. Nay, rather they build up. They are 



HEGEUS CONCEPTION OF GOD 73 

complementary factors in the unity of the organic 
life of man. This is an insight to think and live 
and work by. But it is the offspring of the whole 
man, rather than the product of the mere intel- 
lect. Hegel gives us a true standpoint from 
which to view human history, and then vitiates 
his work by assuming an air of finality and in- 
fallibility. We cannot, from the standpoint of 
scientific knowledge, make dogmatic statements 
with regard to what lies beyond the world of our 
experience. But Hegel's insight into the mys- 
teries of the life of the spirit in the individual and 
the race is profound, and gives a permanent and 
fruitful point of view from which to appreciate 
and penetrate the inner meaning of human history 
and the individual life. 



CHAPTER III. 

SCHLEIERM acker's CONCEPTION OF GOD. 

It should be premised that the word '' concep- 
tion '' does not apply to Schleiermacher's doctrine 
of God in the same technical sense in which it 
applies to Hegel's doctrine of God. For Hegel 
the Divine Idea is simply the actuaHzation of the 
concept {Begriff). Schleiermacher, on the other 
hand, regards the concept as a secondary and 
inadequate expression of the knowledge of God, 
possessing only an approximate and constantly 
changing value. He regards the God-conscious- 
ness as immediate. The direct organ of the 
knowledge of God is feeling. I hope, in the 
course of this exposition, to bring out clearly 
this fundamental divergence of Schleiermacher 
from Hegel. In the meantime I shall endeavor 
to follow the course of Schleiermacher's own ex- 
position of his doctrine. Then I shall give some 
account of his relation to other philosophers, and 
I shall conclude with a brief estimate of the value 
of his views. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 75 

I. Schleierntacher s Doctrine of God in its Various 
Aspects, 

A, The General Attitude as Expressed in the ''Reden 
tlber Religion'' 

Schleiermacher's deeply gifted and many sided 
nature early received a profoundly religious im- 
press; first through the training of his mother, 
and later in the Herrnhutic communities at Niesky 
and Barby. The Herrnhutic brotherhood was 
strictly pietistic in tendency, and its organization 
and methods were wholly directed towards devel- 
oping in the members a personal relation to the 
Saviour. The education given at the seminary 
in Barby was modelled with this design, and the 
contemporary science and literature of the Auf- 
kldrung were rigorously excluded. At the com- 
munity school in Niesky Schleiermacher had, with 
several friends, studied the Greek and Latin class- 
ics, and in spite of the watchfulness of the relig- 
ious teachers and directors at Barby the eager 
spirits of these youthful friends found means of 
further communication with the outside world. 
They eagerly devoured the writings of Wieland, 
Goethe, etc., and the result, in Schleiermacher's 
case, was that at the age of seventeen, after a pain- 
ful struggle and in the face of the stern displeas- 
ure of his father, a minister of the Reformed 
Church, he broke with the brotherhood and sought 



^e MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

more light at the University of Halle. Here he 
found himself in 1787 in the full tide of the Auf- 
kldrmzg. But Schleiermacher had no interest in 
the ruling rationalistic theology of Halle, and de- 
voted his attention, for the most part, in these 
and the succeeding years, to Plato, Aristotle, and 
Kant, and to current Hterature.^ 

Notwithstanding the wide gulf that separated 
Schleiermacher's maturer views from those of the 
Herrnhutists, we see clearly from his letters that 
he remained at one with them in his estimate of 
the independence and supremacy of religion as a 
unique factor in the life of man. 

In his first published work. Addresses on Religion 
to its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher speaks as 
one who has gone through the Aufkldrung, but 
who nevertheless remains in possession of a genuine 
religious experience. The epoch-making character 
of the -^^^r^^i"^.? consists in their vindication of the 
uniqueness of religion in full view of the revolution 
wrought in theology by modern science and phi- 
losophy. There were at the time (the first edition 
of the Addresses is dated 1799) two currents of 
theological rationalism, the one waning, the other 
waxing. The first was that of the natural theol- 
ogy of the eighteenth century, which regarded the 
only valid element in religion to be the intellectual 
assent to the existence of a benevolent Designer 
of Nature. This doctrine had just been shattered 

^ W. Dilthey, Leben Schleiermacher* s^ pp. 12-86. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 77 

to its foundations by Kant's Critique of Pure Rea- 
son, and on its ruins there was being erected the 
moralistic religion of Kant, which made belief in 
God simply the necessary postulate of morality 
and measured the value of religion solely in terms 
of its relation to moral conduct. 

Against these views Schleiermacher asserts that 
religion is neither an annex of science, nor of mo- 
rality. *^True Science is a perfect intuition. True 
Conduct is self-produced culture and art. True 
Religion is sense and taste for the Infinite!' ^ The 
organ of religion is feeling {Gefiikl). This feeling 
of the Infinite, which constitutes the essence of 
religion, exists in the immediate unity of self-con- 
sciousnes.^ In this immediate feeling sense and 
the object are one.^ The aims of both knowledge 
and action are to become one with the universe.^ 
But these aims are attained only in religion. 
When we feel the action of the universe upon us ^ 
this immediate presence of the universe in the 
feeling of self-consciousness is religion. It is the 
presence of God in us, the meeting-point of 
the universal Life with the individual Hfe.^ The 
feeling of being an / and the pious feeling are one. 
The God-consciousness and true self-consciousness 
are mutually involved. 

^ Reden, second edition of Schwarz's reissue of the original 
fourth edition, p. 37. 

2 Ibid,, p. 40. ' Ibid, * Ibid, p. 41. 

"" Ibid., p. 45. ''Ibid., p. 40. 



78 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

This feeling of the oneness of self with the uni- 
verse might, if not further defined, involve a purely 
naturaHstic or even materialistic pantheism. 

But Schleiermacher holds that it is not preemi- 
nently with the outer universe that one is united 
in feeling. It is with the world of humanity, 
which in all its countless individual forms is the 
expression of God's life.^ The feeling for the 
totality of humanity, as divine in origin, and 
the reverence for every man, as a unique mani- 
festation of the divine life, constitute religion.^ 
Hence the true fountain of religion is history. 
Religion is historic, and history is the expression 
of religion. Science and morals are both historic 
manifestations, but they do not present that unity 
of self and the universe which religion alone offers. 
Hence science and morals are both incomplete and 
dependent on religion. 

The unity of self with the universe is realized 
where the living God is present in feeling, and the 
conceptual terms in which we are to think of this 
experience are secondary and dependent on the 
mental characteristics of the individual. God is 
directly present in feeling, but not in the concept.^ 
When we speak of the relation of God to the in- 
dividual we think of him as personal. When we 
think of the limitations of human personality and 
the contradictions involved in applying this con- 
ception to God we think of him as impersonal or, 

' Reden, pp. 65, 67, etc. ^ Ibid,, pp. 68, 69. « Ibid,, p. 87. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 79 

better, as super-personal. Schleiermacher says that 
the manner in which a man may think of person- 
aUty as applied to God will depend on the power 
of his creative imagination {Phantasie) to envisage 
ideas and on his dialectic conscience.^ He regards 
the imagination as the highest power of the human 
mind, and the concreteness of one's idea of God as 
the result of the balance established between imag- 
ination and the dialectic or critical faculty. 

B , The Idea of God in the Dialectic, 

Schleiermacher defines Dialectic as the art of 
philosophizing, the art of grounding knowledge, 
etc.^ Dialectic is both Logic and Metaphysic.^ 
Logic without Metaphysic is not a science, but a 
mere technical art. Metaphysic without Logic is 
capricious and fantastic in its procedure and 
results. 

Knowledge is the unity of Thought and Being, 
of the Ideal and the Real. The test of truth is 
the correspondence of thought with a real being.^ 
But the unity of thought and being does not lie 
in an indifference-point outside consciousness. 

" Knowledge is grounded in the identity of the 
thinking subjects.'' ^ '' In our self-consciousness 
both Thinking and Being are given." ^ Our first 
step in gi-ounding knowledge, then, will be to find 

^ Reden, p. 108, etc. ^ Dialektik, p. 8. 

^ Ibid., p. 7 ; see also Beilage C, i.-vi., and D, i-vi. 
* Ibid., p. 386. ' Ibid., p. 48. ' Ibid,, p. 53. 



8o MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

within the mind the point of contact of thinking 
and being. Schleiermacher begins his investiga- 
tion by defining the objective factor. '^ The ob- 
ject of thinking is the inner impulse from which 
it sets out, and the being to which thinking, as 
knowing, shall correspond is not something outside 
of us, but within — the inner will-movement ^ ^ I 
shall return to this doctrine, that the element of 
objectivity lies in the will, after considering the 
manner in which Schleiermacher unites the ideal 
and the real in the subject regarded as knowing. 
There are two functions of the self — the intellec- 
tual and the organic. The former is the source of 
unity in knowledge, the latter of chaotic manifold- 
ness.^ The two functions are mutually depen- 
dent.^ Knowledge is the product of their inter- 
action. ^' Knowledge is that thinking which can 
be posited in like manner as having issued from 
the organic or the intellectual function.*'* The 
intellectual function brings unity into the or- 
ganic manifoldness under the form of concepts. 
A given concept expresses a multiplicity of judg- 
ments. But inasmuch as judgments are poten- 
tially infinite, we can never complete the series of 

^ Dialektik, p. 49. ' ' The purposeful will makes actual the 
potential personality." (See P. Schmidt, Spinoza und Schleier- 
macher^ p. 172.) 

^ Dialekiik, p. 63. ^ Ibid., p. 57. 

* Ibid., p. 52. As we shall see, they are at bottom the same. 
"Organization is the mental life opened towards the outer 
world." {Ibid., p. 387.) 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 8l 

judgments which would make up the perfect 
sphere of concepts, and hence we can never attain 
a conceptio7i of the absolute unity of Being.^ 

If both factors of knowledge He within the indi- 
vidual subject, the objective validity of knowledge 
must be dependent on an assumed identity of 
reason in all subjects. And this is Schleiermacher's 
position. '' The concepts which are contained in 
the system of knowledge develop in every reason 
in like manner on occasion of organic affections.'' ^ 
The idea of knowledge involves a community of 
experience and principles, and hence an identity 
of reason as well as of organization in all. ^ 

We have seen that, within the individual subject, 
there is a mutual relation of ideal and real ex- 
pressed in the interdependence of the intellectual 
and organic functions. But the community of 
the organic activities of different individuals in- 
volves a being outside of us. Without a stability 
of the organic factor in experience judgment would 
be impossible. Therefore judgment depends on 
the identity of the organic functions of the subject 
with a being outside ourselves.^ In other words, 
the individual subject does not by itself offer a 
complete identity of the ideal and the real, and 
we require a transcendental basis for knowledge 
in the shape of an over-individual stimulus to 
organic activity. The unity of the intellectual 

^ Dialektik, pp. 86, 87. ^ IHd., p. 66. 

* ^ Ibid,, p. 107. ' Ibid., p. 125. 

6 



8:2 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

and organic functions in judgment depends on a 
higher unity. We can have no concept of this ab- 
solute unity. For the concept arises through the 
union of judgments. But nothing can be predicated 
of the highest subject. It is, indeed, the unity of 
the system of judgments, but it is above them.i 
For the system of judgments remains incomplete. 

We have now seen that knowledge involves a 
transcendental ground. Equally so does willing ^ 
(volition). It IS first in willing that we reach a 
genuine conviction as distinguished from mere 
thinking or opinion.^ Persistent willing demands a 
coherence of being with willing. Willing, through 
its concept of an end, is thinking. Thinking, 
through the clearness of its free productivity, is 
willing.^ " In thinking, the being of things is 
posited in us in our manner. In willing, our being 
is posited in things in our manner." The identity 
of thinking and willing supplies the subjective 
unity of intellectual and organic functions, and 
at the same time gives us the transcendental basis 
of both knowledge and action. 

The relative identity of thinking and willing is 
a unity of feeling {Gefuhl), or immediate self con- 
sciousness,^ This immediate feeling differs from 
the reflective self-consciousness or consciousness 
of the /, which arises from the original feeling, 

^ Dialektik, pp. 125, 135, etc. ^ Ibid., p. 148. 

^ Ibid,, p. 150. * Ibid., p. 428. 

^ Ibid,, pp. 151, 429. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 



83 



and it also differs from sensation {Empfindung), 
which is the subjectively personal element in a 
determinate moment of consciousness.^ In re- 
flection our consciousness is divided into the 
opposing moments of thinking and willing, which, 
as we have seen, express antithetical but com- 
plementary aspects of our relation to being. But 
the immediate self-feeling exists before the oppo- 
sitions develop, and these oppositions are again 
resolved in the immediacy of self-feeling. Never- 
theless our consciousness could not be this aboli- 
tion of opposites if we were not conditioned and 
determined by something above the opposites — 
viz., by the transcendental ground itself.^ Hence 
the transcendental basis of knowledge and action, 
the identity of thought and being, is presupposed 
in every movement of our consciousness. It lies 
involved in the immediate unity of our feeling. 
In feeling we are directly related to the primal 
ground of things^ {Urgrund), Will and feeHng are 
coordinated as the two aspects of the fundamental 
being of our determinate existence,^ but will seems 
to be the primitive element common to subject 
and object. Feeling is the subjective identity of 
the receptive and the spontaneous (^>., of think- 
ing and being).^ This identity, objectively con- 

^ Dialektik, p. 429. ' Ibid,, p. 430. 

» Ibid,, p. 430. ' Ihid,, p. 473. 

^ Schleiermacher seems to identify the antithesis of thinking 
and bein2 with that of intellectual and organic. But receptive 



84 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

sidered as knowledge, is intuition. Another form 
of the antithesis is that of representative and 
prefigurative {abbildlich und vorbildliclt) think- 
ing, which have their unity in self-conscious- 
ness.^ 

The outcome of this search for a transcendental 
ground of knowledge and action is the discovery 
of a God-consciousness in immediate feeling or 
intuition. We have reached by a more toilsome 
route the central doctrine of the Addresses on 
Religion, There is a religious feeling or intuition 
immediately involved in self-feeling.^ But we 
must not suppose for an instant that the intuition 
of the Godhead is an isolated experience. The 
very fact that it is the implicate of self-feeling 
precludes such an assumption. We intuit or 
feel the Godhead only in and with the entire 
system of intuitions.^ The Godhead is just as in- 
conceivable as knowledge. For it is the basis of 
knowledge.^ Hence it is as certain as knowl- 
edge.^ The system of knowledge gives us the 

and spontaneous do not mean quite the same for him as organic 
and intellectual. The intellectual function is predominantly 
spontaneous, and the organic predominantly receptive. (See 
W. Bender, Schleiermacher s Theologie, I., p. 28.) Thinking 
(Denken) of course includes both knowing and willing {Er- 
kennen und Wollen). (See Bender, op. cit., p. 32 fF.) 

^ Dialektik, pp. 523, 531, etc. ^ Ibid., p. 430. 

^ *' Intuition is the identity of perception and construction." 
(Ibid., p. 319.) 

* Ibid., p. 322. * Ibid., p. 320. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 85 

intuition of God.i Our knowledge of God can 
only be completed with the completion of our 
view of the world (Weltanschauung), and the two 
develop together.^ In the development of this 
two-sided system of knowledge the system of 
concepts forms the permanent framework, the 
system of judgments (empirically determined) 
the living process of filling-in.^ 

The idea of God and the idea of the world are 
correlative and mutually dependent.^ Both are 
transcendent and involved in knowledge and 
action, but in different senses. The idea of the 
world lies outside our real knowledge, but as 
the idea of a completed system of knowledge it is 
the basis of our progress in knowledge. In other 
words, the idea of the world is that of the com- 
pletion of our progressively realized knowledge. 
It is, as Kant would say, a regulative ideal, and 
is not directly present in any single act of know- 
ing.^ The idea of the world is the transcendental 
terminus ad quern of knowledge. On the other 
hand, the idea of God, as the unity of thought and 
being, is directly involved in every act of knowl- 
edge and will. It is the transcendental unity of 
life which makes possible every step in our lives. 
The idea of God is the transcendental terminus a 
quo and the principle of the possibility of knowl- 

^ Dialekiik, p. 328. ^ Ibid,, p. 322. ^ Ibid,, p. 325. 

* "Kein Gott ohne Welt, so wie keine Welt ohne Gott." 
{Ibid., p. 432.) See also p. 162. ^ Ibid,, p. 164. 



86 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

edge in itself.^ The world is a limit to conception 
{Begriffsgrenze), God is the unity which alone 
makes any conception as well as any action 
possible.^ The world is a unity including all 
opposites. God is a unity excluding and tran- 
scending all opposites.^ He is Life, developing 
opposites out of itself, but since it is timeless, not 
going out of itself/ We cannot say more than that 
God and the world are to be posited as existing 
in mutual relations.^ We cannot identify the two 
ideas. On the other hand, we know nothing of 
God's being beyond the world or in himself.^ 
God dwells in us in our ideas and in our con- 
science. His inborn presence in us constitutes 
our specific essence, for without ideas and with- 
out conscience we should sink to the level of the 
brutes.'^ Conscience involves a general agreement. 
Law is the expression of this agreement, />., of 
conscience. Law must be grounded in an abso- 
lute subject. God, as Creator, is the Law-giver? 
As source of the world-order he is Providence, 
Law is intelligence conceived as power.^ God, as 
Law-giver, is the author of the fixed forms of 
existence, i,e,, he is Creator, The expression 
Providence is not entirely adequate, but we may 

^ Dialektik^ p. 164. ^ Ibid.^ p. 165. 

'^ Ibid., p. 526. « Ibid., p. 154. 

^ Ibid., p. 433. 7 Ibid., pp. 1 54-6. 

^ Ibid.^ p. 531. ^ Ibid,, pp. 427, 519-22. 

''Ibid., p. 474. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 



87 



say that God, as Creator and Providence is at the 
same time Law-giver.^ God is the absolutely 
free subject— free, because he is self-determined. 
For freedom is self-development, self-expression.^ 
Every living being is, in some measure, free, and 
God is absolute freedom since he is Absolute Life. 

Schleiermacher regards Time and Space not as 
illusions, but as images respectively of the ideal 
and the real (/>., of thinking and being) in the 
subject.^ Matter he defines as the chaotic mate- 
rial of consciousness, as that which fills space and 
time.^ 

The Dialectic was never completed, and Schleier- 
macher^s metaphysical treatment of the idea of 
God remains unfinished. 

C The Doctrine of God in the " Christian Faiths 

Schleiermacher's Christliche Glaube is a system- 
atic exposition of the contents and impHcations of 
the specifically Christian religious experience; in 
other words, a scientific account of the religious 
consciousness as manifested in the Christian. 
This exposition falls into two parts. The first 
part develops the principles of the pious self-con- 
sciousness in so far as this is present in man uni- 
versally, and hence is presupposed in the Chris- 
tian. The scope of the first part corresponds to 

1 Dialektik, p. 527. ^ Ibid., p. 398. 

2 Ibid,, pp. 420-1. * Ibid., p. 140. 



88 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

that of the old natural theology or to what we to- 
day call the general philosophy of religion. The 
second part expounds the principles of the specif- 
ically Christian consciousness. The Addresses on 
Religion discovered the root of religion to be the 
feeHng of dependence. The Dialectic showed us 
that the objective unity of consciousness and be- 
ing, which is presupposed in the knowledge and 
action of the individual subject, is presented in 
religious feeling. The Christian Faith takes this 
universal feeling of absolute dependence, /.^., the 
religious feeling, as its starting-point, and ex- 
pounds the nature of God in '' relation to this feel- 
ing.*' The Divine Essence, says Schleiermacher, 
is in itself inexpressible, and the Divine attri- 
butes, as we conceive them, express only moments 
of the pious self-consciousness.^ 

The feeling of absolute dependence — the relig- 
ious feeling — arises in the meeting together of 
self-consciousness and object-consciousness.^ The 
feeling of dependence is most complete when 
we identify ourselves with the world, when we 
see all as one. In this complete oneness of 
finite being there is posited the most perfect and 
universal connection of nature.^ Hence creation, 
the idea of which expresses the absolute depen- 
dence of the world on God, must be the timeless 
activity which issues in the order of nature.^ 

^ Christliche Glaube, I., p. 259 ff. 

^ Ibid,, p. 224. ^Ibid,, p. 227. '^Ibid.,^. 199. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 



89 



The fundamental attribute involved in the feel- 
ing of absolute dependence is the Divine Causal- 
ity} This absolute causality is, with reference to 
its character, distinct from the causality of nature. 
For while the latter occurs in time, the former is 
eternal. On the other hand, with reference to its 
extent, Divine Causahty is simply the whole order 
of nature.^ It is omnipotence. When we compare 
God with finite beings, we get two other attri- 
butes, viz., omnipresence and omniscience. These 
express respectively the spaceless and timeless 
nature of the Divine Causality. For the idea of 
causality, which the feeling of absolute depen- 
dence calls forth in us, cannot be spatial or tem- 
poral.^ However, the spaceless and timeless char- 
acter of omnipotence is better expressed by say. 
ing that God's causality is inward, living, and 
absolutely spiritual.^ 

It is much more important that the Divine 
Causality shall be thought as absolutely living 
than that a similarity shall be estabhshed in some 
specific fashion between God and what we call 
'' mind '' in ourselves. For the latter can be done 
only through an infinite process of approximation, 
since there can be no receptivity or passivity in 
God, and both these quahties are inherent in our 
minds. The only kind of thinking in us which 
is relatively independent of an object is our pur- 

^ Christliche Glaube, I., p. 261. ^ Ibid,, pp. 267-80. 

'' Ibid,, pp. 264-5. Ubid, pp. 268, 291. 



90 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 



posive or end-forming {zweckbildende) activity. 
The greater part of our thinking is dependent 
on the presence of objects. God's thinking is 
entirely of the former or purposive kind. But 
even here we must distinguish between God's 
thinking and man's. We cannot say that in God 
the formation of a purpose comes first and then 
later its execution. For the Divine Thinking and 
the Divine WiUing are absolutely identical.^ 

Schleiermacher holds that the Divine foreknowl- 
edge does not destroy human freedom, since the 
latter is the expression of the nature of the self,^ 
and not a power of acting arbitrarily. 

In the second part of the Christian Faith we 
have a statement of the Divine attributes which 
are involved in the specifically Christian con- 
sciousness. The presupposition here is the recog- 
nition of the reahty of both evil and sin and of 
the need for redemption. Evil is the punishment 
for sin, but sin is social in its effects, and hence 
the evil which befalls the individual cannot be 
deduced from his own sin.^ Sin is our own act. 
Every sinful impulse is, on the one side, the 
expression of a sensuous nature-impulse which 
involves the Divine Causality.^ On the other 
side, sin is a turning away from God, a denial 
of the God-consciousness or of the consciousness 
of the Divine Will in regard to the particular 

^ Christliche Glaube, I., pp. 292-3. ^ Ibid., p. 430. 
" Ibid. , p. 304. 4 ji-^^ ^ p^ ^g2. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 91 

impulse.! God is indeed the cause of the natural 
impulses from which sin arises. On the other 
hand, every impulse can be brought in relation to 
God's will. Hence sin is man's own deed. But 
it can exist only where salvation is possible. The 
consciousness of sin by itself is an abstraction.^ 
In so far as we can never have a consciousness of 
grace without a consciousness of sin we must 
assert that the being of sin is ordained together 
with the grace of God.^ 

The consideration of the state of sin in relation 
to the state of grace gives rise to the ideas of the 
Divine Holiness and Justice. Divine Holiness is 
that Divine Causahty by virtue of which in the com- 
mon life of men the conscience is posited together 
with the need of salvation.^ Hence the conscience 
is social, and the Divine Holiness is the Divine 
legislative causality in the common life. Divine 
Justice is the Divine Causality in so far as it has 
ordained a connection between sin and evil in the 
common life. Hence Divine Justice is social, not 
individual.^ In the Christian life there is no 
general consciousness of God which does not in- 
clude a relation to Christ and no relation to the 
Saviour which is not connected with the general 
God-consciousness. When, through the efficacy 
of salvation, we become conscious of our restored 
fellowship with God and refer this work of sal- 

^ Christliche Glaube, I., p. 453. ^ Ibid., p. 438. 

' Ibid., p. 439. ^ Ibid., p. 460. ® Ibid., p. 465. 



92 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

vation back to the Divine Causality, we assume 
a Divine Government of the world, manifesting 
itself in wisdom and love ^ The Divine Love is 
that attribute by virtue of which the Divine 
Essence communicates itself and is known in the 
work of salvation.^ Love is God's very being in 
relation to men, and hence it differs from all the 
other attributes.^ For in the first part of the 
Glaubenslehre the entire Divine Activity or Caus- 
ality was assumed and discussed without a motive 
for its being. Love, manifested in the work of 
salvation, supplies this motive. All men are 
objects of the Divine Love, but it is not realized 
in all.4 

The Divine Wisdom is the expression of 
love. Wisdom is the principle which orders and 
determines the world for the Divine self-commu- 
nication in the work of salvation. The Divine 
Wisdom is the highest Essence ( Weseii) in its abso- 
lutely simple and originally perfect self-exposition 
and communication.^ The Divine Wisdom is the 
ground by virtue of which the world, as the 
theatre of redemption, is also the absolute reve- 
lation of the highest being, and consequently 
good.^ 

The doctrine of the Trinity, says Schleier- 
macher, expresses the union of the Divine Es- 

^ Christliche Glaube^ II., pp. 507-11. ^ Ibid.^ p. 515. 
^ Ibid,, p. 513. ^ Ibid,, p. 521. 

^ Ibid., p. 517. ^ Ibid,, p. 523. 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 93 

sence with human nature in Christ and in the 
Spirit of the Church. It is not a philosopheme, 
but is the expression of the Christian conscious- 
ness, the touchstone of Christian doctrine, al- 
though not in a wholly satisfactory form. 

2. Schleiermacher' s Relations to Spinoza, Kant, 
Fichte, and Schelling. 

Schleiermacher first made the acquaintance of 
Spinoza's system through Jacobi's Letters on Spi- 
noza, In his commentary on the latter work, al- 
though confined to Jacobi's quotations for a direct 
knowledge of Spinoza, he shows a much finer 
understanding of Spinoza's system than Jacobi.i 
Schleiermacher always spoke of Spinoza with en- 
thusiasm, and he has been called a Spinozist. 
But while there are important points of contact 
in the two systems, there are equally important 
points of divergence. Schleiermacher shares 
Spinoza's idea and love of the One, The Infinite 
is not outside the world of phenomena. On the 
contrary, the latter exist within the Infinite One. 
The latter is the completion of the series of con- 
ditioned existences, and not something separated 
from them. The Infinite exists in the finite. On 
the other hand, the Infinite One of Schleiermacher 
is a living Spirituality, dynamically conceived, in 
which thought holds the primacy, whereas Spi- 

^ See Dilthey, Denkmale Schleiermacher' s, pp. 64-9. 



94 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

noza's Absolute is the static indifference-point of 
an infinite number of attributes, of which two, 
thought and extension, are known to us. Moreover, 
Schleiermacher's most original and important phil- 
osophical doctrine, that of the worth of individ- 
uality, separates him from Spinoza. Whilst the 
latter holds that Body and Soul are related only in 
and through the Divine substance, Schleiermacher 
regards every human individual as a unique mani- 
festation of the unity of the ideal and the real, of 
thought and being. Hence human individuality 
is with him a sacred and significant manifestation 
of the Absolute.^ There is an inconsistency be- 
tween Spinoza's conception of the Absolute and 
his recognition of the reality of the individual. 
For Spinoza determination, and therefore individ- 
uation, is negation. For Schleiermacher individu- 
ation is afSrmation. Here he takes up Leibnitz's 
doctrine of the positive reality of the monads as 
mirrors of the universe, but he rejects their ab- 
solute independence of one another, and sets up 
instead a dynamic unity. 

Plato and Kant were Schleiermacher's greatest 
philosophical masters. Schleiermacher strives to 
be true to the spirit of the Critical Philosophy^ 
while purging it of its inconsistencies, and infus- 
ing into it the spirit of Plato. He is a more 
sympathetic and appreciative disciple of Kant 

^See Dilthey, Lehen Schleiermacher's, pp. 147-52, and P. 
Schmidt, Spinoza und Schleierf?iacher, 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 95 

than either Fichte, SchelHng, or Hegel. Schleier- 
macher rejects Kant's moral postulate as to the 
necessity of uniting virtue and happiness, and his 
consequent inference as to the necessity of an 
omnipotent Being outside the world, who shall 
heal the breach existing between them in this life. 
Schleiermacher accepts the negative results of the 
Kantian dialectic, and strives to find within the 
limits of experience, as these are defined by criti- 
cism, a principle by virtue of which the two Kantian 
dualisms — of sense and understanding within the 
individual subject, and of thought and being within 
the cosmos — can be overcome. Such a principle 
he finds in the synthetic unity of the individual 
consciousness. Kant's doctrine is that this syn- 
thetic unity has an over-individual origin, that it 
is transcendentally involved in knowledge, but 
cannot be empirically verified in the experience 
of the finite self. Schleiermacher, guided by the 
attempt of Kant in the Critique of Judgment to 
find a solution of his two duaHsms in the imme- 
diate unity of aesthetic feeling, endeavours to dis- 
cover the actual presence of such an immediate 
self -consciousness or feeling of unity in every act 
of knowledge and voHtion. In this attempt he 
was influenced by the current idea of an intel- 
lectual intuition, Schleiermacher's doctrine of 
self-feeling or the immediate self-consciousness is 
the discovery of the actual presence of the syn- 
thetic unity of consciousness in the life of the 



96 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

empirical /. His doctrine that the transcendental 
ground of existence is revealed in this immediate 
feeling, is the restatement of the Kantian trans- 
cendental unity of consciousness in terms of the 
felt-unity of the actual self. The God of Schleier- 
macher is the transcendental unity of Kant dis- 
covered to be the condition of the unity of 
conscious life in the finite self.^ 

Fichte and Schleiermacher had their common 
starting-point in Kant. Fichte's doctrine of the 
harmony of subject and object, the /and the not- 
/, was congenial to Schleiermacher. He was also 
in agreement with Fichte's conception of the will 
as the centre of the individual /, and Fichte*s en- 
tire genetic method which started from the finite 
/ appealed to him. But Schleiermacher was not 
willing to go with Fichte in his reduction of the 
entire outer world to an illusory reflection of the 
activity of the /. Moreover, as time went on, the 
important differences in their conceptions of in- 
dividuality came to the front. Fichte regards in- 
dividuality as a limitation of the Absolute, and 
holds that the nearer one comes to the Absolute 
the more does one's individuality retreat into the 
background. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, 
regards the genesis of the individual as a free and 
self-expressive act of the Absolute, and he carries 
the finite individual into the holy of holies of the 

^ See Dilthey, Leben Schleiermacher' s, pp. 88-128, and J. Gotts- 
chick, Ueber Schleiermacher s Verhdlhtiss gegen Kant, 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 97 

religious life.^ In Dilthey's admirable phrase, 
Schleiermacher joins together the self-intuition of 
Fichte and the world-intuition of Spinoza in the 
original coherence of his own system.^ 

Schleiermacher was influenced by Schelling's 
Philosophy of Nature, particularly by his doctrine 
of opposites. No doubt, too, his own philosophical 
reflection was stimulated by Schelling's doctrine 
of the identity of thought and being. But it 
would be a great error to regard Schleiermacher's 
doctrine of identity as an offshoot from Schell- 
ing's. For in the Addresses on Religion Schleier- 
macher had already struck out on an independent 
way to the unification of the ideal and the real. 
Schelling's intellectual intuition is exclusive and 
aristocratic. Schleiermacher's union with the Ab- 
solute in the immediacy of feeling is universally 
human and democratic. 

3. The Significance of Schleiermacher s Conception 
of God, 

Schleiermacher's exposition of the originality 
and uniqueness of the religious Hfe in man anid 
his doctrine of immediate self-consciousness or 
the feeling of unity as the source of religion in 
the individual are the most important contribu- 
tions towards a philosophy of religion that have 
been made in modern times. While he vindicates 

'See Dilthey, op. cit.y p. 142. ^ Ibid., p. 354- 

7 



98 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

the uniqueness of religion he does not separate 
it from the general life of the self. Religion is 
the meeting-place of self and world. This imme- 
diate feeling of unity or fundamental intuition in 
which the religious life is grounded is the root of 
the distinctions and oppositions which arise in the 
analytical processes of thought and volition, and, 
at the same time, it is the medium in which these 
oppositions and distinctions are constantly being 
transcended in the onward movement of life. 
*^ Self-intuition and intuition of the universe are 
interchangeable conceptions."^ ^^ The universe 
is like man in that in both activity is the principal 
thing, the events only the fleeting results of it.*' ^ 
Hoffding says that, inasmuch as the reality for 
us consists in subjective feeling or intuition, 
Schleiermacher is not entitled to regard any doc- 
trines as more than symbols, and that when he in- 
fers from the existence of the feeling of depen- 
dence an objective cause in the form of an Abso- 
lute Being, he has gone beyond his premises.^ 
Hoffding thinks that the desire to mediate be- 
tween theology and philosophy has betrayed 
Schleiermacher into this fallacy. Hoffding seems 
here to misunderstand the procedure by which 
Schleiermacher reaches his doctrine of God as the 
transcendental ground of existence. Schleier- 
macher, keeping within the limits of the critical 

'Dilthey^ Denkmale Schleiermacher s^ p. Ii8. ^ Ibid.^ p. 117. 
^Hoffding, History of Modern. Philosophy {YjVi^. trans.), p. 21 1, 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 99 

philosophy, does not anywhere regard God as an 
individual, objective cause in the same sense in 
which we speak of one phenomenal event as the 
cause of another. God, for him, is the under- 
lying principle, the alUmbracing life of the 
phenomenal universe. God transcends the single 
individual, but not the whole system of individ- 
uals. Schleiermacher^s Absolute is not separated 
from the universe. He does not hold that the 
Absolute is the external cause of the feeling of 
dependence or of the immediate unity of our- 
selves with the universe, but that he is the abso- 
lute ground of these feelings, and in himself 
transcends the individual life. The specific at- 
tributes of God are indeed symbols, but Schleier- 
macher repeatedly states that these attributes do 
not at all account for the unitary being of God. 
They only express aspects of his relation in and 
to us. God as the absolute unity is the conditio 
sine qua non of our conscious selfhood. 

It is clear that Schleiermacher did not hold to 
the personality of God in the traditional sense.^ 
He did not see how the transcendental ground of 
finite personality could be the absolute condition 
of finite personality and yet be described as per- 
sonal in itself. But Schleiermacher held to what 
is of most value in the traditional idea of person- 
ality. God is for him the absolute ethical Life, the 

^See E. Zeller, Erinnerung an Schleier77iacher s Lehre von 
der Personlichkeit Gottes, in his Theologisches Jahrbuch, Bd. I. 



lOO MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

Infinite and Transcendent Spirit. Perhaps a re- 
constructed notion of personality will in the future 
find room for Schleiermacher's fundamental ideas 
on the relation of God and man. 

Schleiermacher's emphasis on the unity and un- 
changeableness of the Divine Causality involves 
a serious difficulty in regard to the ideas of free- 
dom and sin in the individual. He is a determin- 
ist, but he asserts the objective reality of sin and 
at the same time the responsibility of the individ- 
ual. Sin, he says, is an actual destruction of na- 
ture. The reality of sin involves the need of re- 
demption as a historical process. But neither con- 
ception is consistent with Schleiermacher's doctrine 
of the absolute unchangeableness and all-inclusive- 
ness of the Divine Causality. Schleiermacher un- 
derstands by human freedom the self-determina- 
tion of the unique individual, and this idea of the 
free self, taken in conjunction with the reality of 
a historical process of redemption, involves defi- 
nitely the idea of God as a self-conscious unitary 
Life who at once expresses himself and limits him- 
self in the production of finite individuals. This 
idea, when carried out, involves further the exist- 
ence of distinctions within the Divine Nature it- 
self and the reconstruction of the doctrine of the 
Divine unchangeableness. The latter doctrine 
must either be formulated in such a manner as to 
admit a real living and progressive relationship 
between the finite individual and God, or it must 



SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION 



lOI 



be given up entirely. Schleiermacher does not 
seem to have apprehended either the inherent 
difficulty of this problem or the great import of 
the practical and religious as well as speculative 
interests involved in its solution. His own doc- 
trine of the unchangeableness of the Divine 
Causality approaches very closely the abstract 
and motionless Absolute of Spinoza. It tends to 
become a modern version of the Eleatic one. 
Schleiermacher's idea of God can be corrected 
and developed from his own starting-point. He 
lays stress on the sacredness and worth of indi- 
viduality. He deduces the being of God from 
the feeling of dependence within the finite self- 
consciousness. But he does not deal adequately 
with the social relations of the individual which 
are involved in the fact of knowledge as w^ell as in 
action. He hints that the individual conscious- 
ness of change and the feehng of absolute de- 
pendence are the encompassing elements of self- 
consciousness which lead the individual out of 
himself.^ But a more careful consideration of the 
problem implied in the relation of the individual 
to the social factor in knowledge and volition 
would make room for a more concrete conception 
of God and one more closely related to human 
personality. 

In his great doctrine of the ethical worth and the 
philosophical and religious significance of individu- 

^ Philosophise he Sittenlehre, p. 243. 



102 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

ality or personal uniqueness, Schleiermacher has 
raised a problem slighted by his great contempo- 
rary Hegel, and has made an important contribu- 
tion to its solution. If we are to attain an adequate 
philosophical conception of God we must start from 
the individual, i,e,j we must start from Schleier- 
macher's point of departure. But there is another 
correlated problem which was first seen clearly and 
handled adequately by Hegel — that of the objec- 
tive or institutional spirit embodied in the work of 
history. These two ideas of the individual spirit 
and the objective or historical spirit are comple- 
mentary, and the future philosophical doctrine of 
man and his relation to God must be built on them. 
Perhaps just now we need most a reconsideration 
of individuality. 

Hegel possessed a concrete wealth of knowl- 
edge and a speculative grasp of history which 
Schleiermacher did not have. On the other hand, 
Schleiermacher was a virtuoso in the appreciation 
of personality and looked much further and more 
clearly into the depths of the personal life. His 
vindication of the uniqueness of religion, his 
estimate of the philosophical importance of the 
immediate or feeling-aspect of human self-con- 
sciousness, and his doctrine of individuality are 
all evidences that Schleiermacher possessed a 
keen, subtle, and sympathetic insight into the 
soul of man. 



CHAPTER IV. 

MR. spencer's unknown GOD. 

Mr. spencer's theory of the ultimate reality 
which underlies appearances may be summed up 
in a very few words. The object of philosophi- 
cal investigation is '* that unascertained some- 
thing which phenomena and their relations im- 
ply.'' ^ The title of the first section of his First 
Principles is ** The Unknowable." He proceeds 
in this work to show us that the ** Unknowable " 
is the ground of meeting and reconciliation of 
science and religion. All religions have their 
legitimate sphere ** in that nescience which must 
ever remain the antithesis to science. "^ Nes- 
cience, then, being the subject-matter of religion, 
science might claim that by its own methods were 
disclosed truths hidden to religion. This is true, 
Mr. Spencer says, but when each scientific prin- 
ciple is pushed to its legitimate conclusion, i.e.y 
when it is raised to a philosophical principle, it 
too terminates in nescience. Hence, whether we 
view it from a religious or a scientific point of 
view, *' the Power which the universe manifests 

^ First Principles, Fourth Edition, p. 17. '^ Ihid. 



I04 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

to us is utterly inscrutable/*^ ** The mystery 
of the universe is not a relative, but an absolute 
mystery/ '2 These statements are sufficiently 
clear, but they at once start certain questions. 
It is positively asserted that we know nothing 
about the ultimate reality except that it is abso- 
lutely unknowable. This certainly is a species of 
knowledge unique in kind. How can we know that 
we can know absolutely nothing about a conceiv- 
able object of knowledge ? Mr. Spencer's knowl- 
edge of the unknowability of the ultimate reality 
is, so far as it goes, very positive. And, further- 
more, he knows that the Unknowable is a Power, 
'' an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all 
things proceed. * ' The certainty that such a Power 
exists, while, on the other hand, its nature tran- 
scends intuition, is the certainty towards which 
intelligence has from the first been progressing.^ 
Furthermore, we know the modes in which this 
inscrutable Power manifests itself. ** The Power 
manifested throughout the universe distinguished 
as material, is the same Power which in ourselves 
wells up under the form of consciousness. ' ' ^ Not- 
withstanding the antinomies which Mr. Spencer 
finds to be involved in thinking *' Infinite '' and 
*' Eternal," and notwithstanding that the deep- 
est nescience is the goal of human thought, he 
confidently asserts that *' amid the mysteries 

^ First Principles^ p. 46. ^ Ibid. 

'^ Ibid. ^ Principles of Sociology, III., p. 171. 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 105 

which become the more mysterious the more 
they are thought about, there will remain (to 
man) the one absolute certainty, that he is ever 
in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, 
from which all things proceed/' ^ 

The positiveness of this conclusion, when com- 
pared with Mr. Spencer's declaration of the im- 
potence of knowledge when it is confronted with 
ontological problems, is sufficient of itself to 
awaken doubts as to the legitimacy of his pro- 
cedure. I therefore propose to inquire: first, 
how Mr. Spencer arrives at his conclusion; sec- 
ond, whether his procedure is consistent and his 
conclusion valid; and, third, if the second inquiry 
receives a negative answer, how may Mr. Spen- 
cer's procedure be corrected. ^ 

Mr. Spencer is agreed that the starting-point 
for philosophy lies in consciousness. We can 
never reach anything which is absolutely differ- 
ent from consciousness. He says if one regard 
one's '' conceptions of these activities lying be- 
yond Mind, as constituting knowledge, he is 
deluding himself; he is but representing these 
activities in terms of Mind and can never do 
otherwise." ^ Here it is already implied that the 
activities outside mind are absolutely different 
from the activities of mind. Hence the mind 
cannot possibly know the activities which lie out- 

^ Principles of Sociology, III., p. 175- 

^ Principles of Psychology, Third Edition, I., p. 160. 



Io6 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

side itself. It is at once assumed that the nature 
of extra-mental reality is such that it cannot be 
known. Mr. Spencer rehabilitates the *' Ding- 
an-sich/* and from the same motive which orig- 
inally led Kant to set it up — fear of subjective 
idealism. Mr. Spencer takes it for granted that 
if there is a real world beyond the human mind, 
it must be toto coelo different from mind ; other- 
wise it could not be real. This is an entirely un- 
warranted assumption. Kant, having set up the 
** Ding-an-sich *' from the fear of being regarded 
as a subjective idealist, at once drops it and pro- 
ceeds to analyze experience in itself, Kant sees 
that the ** Ding-an-sich'* can have no place in 
the analysis of thought. The ^' Thing-in-itself " is 
a vanishing quantity in Kant's analysis of experi- 
ence. On the other hand, Mr. Spencer's chief 
concern is to dump the contents of experience 
into his Unknowable. Let us see how he accom- 
plishes this end. 

Belief in an external world is, he says, a result 
of the interaction of the organism and the en- 
vironment. The two factors, subject and object, 
imply one another, and their relation increasingly 
discloses some active power beyond conscious- 
ness, always in interaction with consciousness. ^ 
** The consciousness of self and the conscious- 
ness of not-self are the elements of an unceasing 
rhythm in consciousness." ^ We have thus, in 

^ Pri7tciples of Psychology^ II., p. 505, hh. '^ Ibid., p. 438. 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 107 

Mr. Spencer's theory, two factors, mind or the 
subject, and something external which acts on 
mind. Mind at once reacts on the ** something 
external,*' and so forms a conception of the lat- 
ter. But the action of mind on its material 
seems to Mr. Spencer to be the distortion of that 
material, so that the subject never attains to a 
true conception of the object. Here he makes 
a wholly gratuitous assumption of disharmony 
between the mind and its material. He seeks 
to prove his assumption by showing that the 
process of mind in knowing is such that it cannot 
possibly disclose the nature of Reality. He holds 
that Reality is necessarily implied m all knowledge, 
but is not revealed therein. This is '* transfigured 
realism,'' and leads directly to the hypothesis of 
the unknowability of the objective world. 

Mind does not know the nature of Reality. 
What, then, is the relation of mind to the total- 
ity of the Real ? Mind ** is a differentiated and 
integrated division of the totality of being. "^ 
We can think of matter only in terms of mind. 
Nevertheless matter is in some way real, and 
mind is, like matter, a part of the total Real. 
But the admission that we must think the ex- 
ternal world in terms of mind is strong presump- 
tion in favor of the theory that the external world 
is likewise mind in some form. Mr. Spencer re- 
plies that we can think mind only in terms of 

^ Principles of Psychology, II., p. 505, vv. 



I08 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

matter. He overlooks the fact that matter is 
one of the categories which the mind uses in 
thinking its own experience. The theory that 
matter is of similar nature to mind explains the 
knowability of the external world. If the latter 
is mental, then, when the subject reads that world 
in terms of its own consciousness, it is not falsify- 
ing the external world, but finding itself therein. 
Throughout his treatment of the epistemological 
problem of the relation of knowledge to reality 
Mr. Spencer fails to clearly distinguish mind in 
its generic capacity and the individual subject^ 
mind. His reasoning is conclusive against solip- 
sistic idealism, and he is justified in saying that 
each individual mind is a differentiated and in- 
tegrated division of the totality of being. But 
he has by no means shown that there exists any- 
thing beyond minds. The mental characteristics 
of our external world, as revealed in experience, 
may justify us in assuming a mind in some form 
as the ultimate Reality from which individual 
minds are derived. Mr. Spencer would reply 
that we are in no better case than before, since 
** Mind also is unknowable.'* ^ 

He holds that the progress of knowledge con- 
sists in proceeding from concrete mental ex- 
perience to the analysis of that experience into 
abstractions. For him, abstract hypothetical 
elements constitute the reality of things, of which 

^ Principles of Psychology^ I., p. 159. 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 109 

concrete experience is the imperfect manifesta- 
tion. He finds the reality of mind in the sup- 
posed primordial elements out of which it is built 
up. *' There may be a single primordial element 
of consciousness. * ' ^ He thinks it probable * ' that 
something of the same order as that which we 
call a nervous shock is the ultimate unit of con- 
sciousness, and that all the unlikenesses among 
our feelings result from unlike modes of integra- 
tion of this ultimate unit. ' ' ^ But why assume any 
such primordial unit of feeling as the substance 
of mind ? Shall we not gain a truer knowledge 
of the nature of mind by seeking the relations 
involved in our concrete experience as a totality ? 
We throw away all possibility of knowing any- 
thing about either our minds as concrete wholes 
or the external world, if we resolve the mind into 
utterly featureless, unknowable elements. The 
^otal mind is the real existence, not hypothetical 
primordial shocks. Mr. Spencer's procedure is 
*' the reduction of all the more complex forms to 
the simplest form,'' which '' leaves us with noth- 
ing but this simplest form out of which to frame 
our thought." ^ '* If every state of mind is some 
modification of this substance of mind, there can 
be no state of mind in which the unmodified sub- 
stance of mind is present."^ So that we can 
know nothing of the substance of mind, hence 

^ Principles of Psychology, I., p. 150- ^ ^'^^'^•' P- ^57- 

^/^^V.,p. 151. ^/^/^.,pp. 146-7. 



no MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

nothing of mind. This assumption, of simple 
elements, of a mind-substance existing apart from 
its manifestations, is but the setting up of a 
scholastic entity. It is assumed that the sub- 
stance of mind consists of units of feeling, and 
because these are not known as such it follows 
of course that mind is unknowable. Mr. Spen- 
cer's mind-substance is clearly an elusive and 
unknowable ** ghost'' of his own raising. This 
unknowable mind-substance leads us directly to 
a consideration of Mr. Spencer's general theory 
of the Unknowable and the process by which he 
arrives at it. 

The chapter^ on ultimate religious ideas opens 
with a consideration of the nature of conceptions 
and their adequacy to their objects.^ 

Our conceptions become more symbolic, i.e.^ 
less like the reality, as they rise in generality. 
This symbolizing process is necessary, but leads 
to our mistaking our symbolic conceptions for 
real ones. We habitually regard our symbolic 
conceptions as real because they can in most 
cases be developed into complete ones. A con- 
ception is ** complete only when the attributes 
of the objects conceived are of such number and 
kind that they can be represented in conscious- 
ness so nearly at the same time as to seem all 
present together."^ As the objects conceived 

* First Principles, part i., chap, ii., pp. 25-46. 
' Ibid., § 9, p. 25 ff. * Ibid., p. 29. 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 



III 



become larger in extent and meaning the con- 
ceptions of them grow less complete and more 
symbolic. The use of such symbolic conceptions 
is legitimate so long as by any process of thought 
we can assure ourselves that they stand for ac- 
tualities. Beyond this, he says, these symboHc 
conceptions are vicious and illusory. 

With this criticism of conceptions in mind Mr. 
Spencer proceeds to examine ultimate religious 
ideas. The first of these to present themselves 
are the ideas growing out of the problems of the 
origin of the universe.^ In this regard there are 
three suppositions — self-existence, self-creation, 
and creation by an external agency. We would 
all doubtless agree with Mr. Spencer that the 
idea of the creation of the universe by an ex- 
ternal agency involves a palpable absurdity, pro- 
vided the universe is taken as meaning the entire 
circle of being, and not a finite world, with be- 
ginning and end. Self-creation or passage from 
potential existence to actual existence is rightly 
regarded by him as vague and inconceivable. 
But if we mean by self-creation that the universe 
is active and contains within itself a principle of 
development, this does not seem to me to be an 
impossible though it is indeed a vague concep- 
tion. Mr. Spencer seems to mistake entirely the 
meaning of the statement that the universe is 
self-existent. Strictly speaking, the phrase is, 

^ First Principles, § ii, p. 30 ff. 



112 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

perhaps, an unfortunate one. To say that the 
universe is self-existent is only to say that the 
universe possesses continuity of existence. Self- 
existence means, indeed, existence without a be- 
ginning, but it does not mean that we must try 
to think the universe as existent in endless past 
time. We may say with truth that the Universe 
of Being possesses continuity of existence. Ac- 
cepting Mr. Spencer's criticism that this does 
not explain how being came to be, we may reply 
that the question how being was made is absurd 
and meaningless. 

Having disposed of these illusory symbolic 
conceptions which refer to the origin of the uni- 
verse, he turns to those which express the nature 
of the universe. *' The objects and actions sur- 
rounding us, not less than the phenomena of 
our consciousness compel us, to ask a cause : 
in our search for a cause we discover no resting- 
place until we arrive at the hypothesis of a First 
Cause : and we have no alternative but to regard 
this First Cause as Infinite and Absolute."^ 
He says it might be shown that these are sym- 
bolic conceptions of the illegitimate order. He 
prefers to show the contradictions involved in 
viewing the three conceptions — the First Cause, 
the Absolute, and the Infinite as attributes of 
one and the same being. He avails himself of 
Mr. Mansers demonstration, which is substan- 

^ First Principles, p. 38. 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 113 

tially as follows i^ Cause exists only in relation 
to effect. The Absolute is out of all relation. 
Therefore it can cause nothing. It does not 
avoid the difficulty to say the Absolute exists 
first by itself and afterwards as a cause. For the 
Absolute is infinite. How can the Infinite be- 
come that which it was not ? The Absolute can 
neither be related to anything else nor contain 
an essential relation within itself. ** For if there 
is in the Absolute any principle of unity distinct 
from the mere accumulation of parts or attributes, 
this principle alone is the true Absolute/* ^ and 
if there is no such principle there is no Absolute, 
but only plurality. Even if these difficulties 
were overcome it would be impossible to imag- 
ine the Absolute as cause of the relative. The 
Absolute is perfect. If causal activity is a higher 
state than quiescence, then in becoming causal 
the Absolute becomes more perfect, and this 
again is contradictory. The Absolute and In- 
finite involves contradictions from whatever side 
it is viewed. 

Nevertheless, says Mr. Spencer, we are not to 
conclude that there is no '' fundamental verity*' 
contained in these errors. Following his method, 
he abstracts from all these contradictory views 
and from the multiplicity of religious creeds their 

^ Firsl Principles, p. 39 ff. Mr. Mansel's treatment is sub- 
stantially a repetition of Kant's in the Antinomies of Reason. 
^ First Principles, p. 40. 
8 



114 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

common element. This common element we 
discover to be the utter inscrutability of their 
subject-matter. Mr. Spencer does not tell us 
how the conception of Power or Energy survives 
through all this process of abstraction. On his 
principles he is not entitled to say positively that 
the ultimate is even an *' Ultimate," much less 
an *' absolute mystery.** Having completely ob- 
literated all content from the ultimate religious 
ideas, Mr. Spencer performs the same office by 
the ultimate scientific ideas.i He finds time and 
space inconceivable. Into his criticism I have 
not space to enter, but I will make one remark 
thereon. His dilemma — that if Space and Time 
are entities we cannot conceive them because 
they are without attributes, and if they are non- 
entities we cannot conceive them since they 
would be two nothings — does not exhaust the 
problem. It is thinkable that Space and Time 
are in some way properties of the Real, and that 
they are relatively imperfect aspects under which 
the Real appears to us. It is possible that, in 
Plato's words, they share in both being and non- 
being. Mr. Spencer points out the difficulties in 
the way of conceiving matter as either infinitely 
or finitely divisible, and shows that if matter is 
absolutely solid the law of continuity is broken 
in regard to collision. Again, he says, if we re- 
gard matter as made up of solid units, we must 

* First Principles ^ chap, iii., pp. 47-67. 



MR. SPENCER^S UNKNOWN GOD uq 

still inquire as to the constitution of these units 
and so we cannot bring our thought to a termina' 
tion. Motion and the relations of motion and 
rest are likewise involved in contradictions. We 
cannot conceive the nature of force or understand 
the connection between force and matter. Turn- 
ing inward, we ask, Is consciousness finite or in- 
finite ? and cannot find an answer. We cannot 
know the self truly, for ** a true cognition of the 
self implies a state in which the knowing and the 
known are one, in which subject and object are 
identical. * ' ^ When we have resolved external 
phenomena into manifestations of force in space 
and time, we still find that force, space, and time 
are incomprehensible. When we have resolved 
mental actions into sensations we find that sen- 
sations are incomprehensible. To the man of 
science objective and subjective things are alike 
inscrutable. 

Having demonstrated the incomprehensibility 
of ultimate facts, whether viewed from the side 
of religion or of science, Mr. Spencer proceeds 
to clinch his argument by showing on rational 
grounds that all knowledge is relative, and hence, 
of course, inadequate to its object. ^ All expla- 
nation and all understanding of cognized facts 
depends on their reduction to more general cogni- 
tions. '*As the most general cognition cannot 
be reduced to a more general one, it cannot be 

^ J^irs^ Principles, p. 65. ' Ibid., chap, iv., pp. 68-97. 



Il6 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

understood. Of necessity, therefore, explana- 
tion must eventually bring us down to the inex- 
plicable. The deepest truth which we can get at 
must be unaccountable." ^ This result reached 
by an analysis of the product of thought our 
author finds confirmed by a study of \.\i^ process 
of thought. He quotes Sir William Hamilton's 
and Mr. Hansel's demonstrations of the rela- 
tivity of knowledge, which are substantially as 
follows: 2 To think is to condition, to distinguish 
objects and bring them into relation with one 
another. To distinguish one object from another 
is to limit one by the other. But the Absolute, 
the Infinite is without condition, and so cannot 
be thought. The Infinite is the mere negation 
of the finite. It can have nothing either in com- 
mon with or different from the finite. Again, 
our whole notion of existence is relative, and we 
can form no conception of the Absolute, since it 
is merely the absence of relations. Mr. Spencer 
tries to strengthen this demonstration by addi- 
tions of his own. If we are to know the Abso- 
lute and Infinite, it must be classed. Classifica- 
tion involves recognition. But the Absolute can 
be like nothing else that we know, and therefore 
cannot be recognized or known. Again, the rela- 
tivity of our thinking to relations in our environ- 
ment shows that no thought can express more 
than relations. 

^ First Principles, p. 73. ' Ibid., p. 74 ff. 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD uy 

It has apparently been proved in so many ways 
that the Absolute is absolutely inscrutable, one 
might infer that it is Mr. Spencer^s purpose to 
reduce it to a mere negation of consciousness. 
But no ! He maintains that we have a positive 
though indefinite consciousness of the Absolute. 
This consciousness is formed by the attrition and 
coalescence of all our ideas and conceptions. i So 
we arrive at the consciousness of an actuality 
lying beyond appearances. When all our concrete 
experiences have been emptied into the Ultimate 
Inscrutability, we are told that this Inscrutability 
still is. This is the mere statement that Being is 
— a bare tautology. We are told that religion 
is the consciousness of the ** inscrutable power 
manifested to us through all phenomena.'' We 
must ** refrain from assigning to it any attributes, 
on the ground that such attributes, derived as 
they must be from our own natures, are not eleva- 
tions, but degradations/* 2 So we are offered as 
the object of our ultimate belief and worship a 
** night in which all cows are black.'' 

It is evident that Mr. Spencer regards the prog- 
ress of knowledge as an increase in extension 
accompanied by a corresponding decrease in in- 
tension. As conceptions embrace wider fields of 
existence within their grasp, they become less 
adequate to express the concrete fulness of ex- 
istence. In his own language they become more 

^ First Principles, p. 87 ff. ' Ibid., p. 109. 



Il8 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

symbolic and less real. For the completest con- 
ception is one in which all the attributes of the 
object are held together at the same moment in 
consciousness. The truth in this view is that 
the concept should be the logical unity of all the 
attributes of the object. As such, the concept ex- 
presses the unity of a series of judgments. The 
ideal concept is a principle of unity of which the 
attributes are moments. Mr. Spencer says that 
conceptions become very unlike the things con- 
ceived when we come to propositions concerning 
wide-embracing classes, e,g,, the vertebrata or 
the whole animal kingdom. Now, the truth is 
that the perceptual imager which is the psychi- 
cal setting of the concept, may become more 
unlike the individual objects of the group. But 
the true concept of a class of objects is not formed 
merely by the attrition and coalescence of the 
perceptual images of particular objects. The 
concept is not an average percept. A concept 
expresses, through the unification of particular 
judgments^ the unity of the salient features in the 
form and behavior of the class of objects which 
it stands for. The concept is adequate only 
when the attributes of its group are grasped, not 
simply together, but in their relations to one an- 
other, so that these attributes are conceived, not 
as existing side by side in an external juxtaposi- 
tion, but as reciprocally influencing one another 
in the unity of the concrete objects. Every true 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD hq 

concept will then be complete in so far as the 
group of objects it stands for is complete. But 
since groups of objects exist only in relation to 
other groups no single group-concept can have 
meaning in isolation from others. 

Mr. Spencer's method is wholly analytic. He 
holds that the goal of thinking is the discovery 
of the most highly abstract laws. These he holds 
to be true and yet not true, because they stand 
at the farthest remove from the concrete world 
of perception. He holds that science constructs 
its laws from experience of the real world, and 
yet the construction is of such a character that 
the real world cannot be reconstructed in terms 
of science. Now, on the contrary, knowledge 
can claim to fulfil its purpose and to approach 
completeness only when its highest principles or 
laws are grasped in their mutual relations, not as 
abstracted from the concrete details of experi- 
ence, but as the principles of the concrete par- 
ticulars which make up the real world of percep- 
tion. Such a system of principles will give to 
each particular its true meaning by exhibiting its 
place in the individual system which constitutes 
reality. The discovery of the laws of phenomena 
can be said to decrease our knowledge of phe- 
nomena only when these laws are hypostatized 
and placed above the world of experience in soli- 
tary state. A really synthetic philosophy would 
endeavor to see each principle of science as an 



120 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

element in that organic unity of knowledge 
through which alone knowledge represents real- 
ity. Each particular law or truth represents a 
phase or moment of reality. Neither abstract 
law nor bare fact is true in isolation. Both are 
elements in a relational unity of experience. As 
such an element the law represents the fact by 
stating the conditions of its existence. Conse- 
quently '' the most general cognition at which 
we can arrive*' is not ** inexplicable.*' It is a 
cognition, and has a meaning only because it is 
the organic unity of all less general cognitions, 
and so represents the organic unity of the real 
world. It is no more inexplicable than the most 
modest fact in the world. Indeed, it is nothing 
but that relational unity which is implied in the 
concrete world, and the explication of which con- 
fers meaning on the particular facts of percep- 
tion. Truth is an organism, not a mechanical 
heap of isolated laws. Analysis and synthesis 
imply one another. It is as necessary for the 
life of knowledge that they should go on to- 
gether as it is for the animal organism that katabo- 
lism and anabolism should work together. Any 
single truth is by itself abstract, a mere particu- 
lar. Truths express the relations of facts. But 
no truth is true by itself. When a truth is 
grasped in its relations then the facts which it 
represents are transformed. Seen in their rela- 
tions they cease to be mere particulars, and be- 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 



121 



come concrete individual elements in the system 
of experience. 

It is this false conception of knowledge as a 
mere process of analysis or abstraction that has 
led Mr. Spencer to accept the empty conceptions 
of the First Cause, Infinite and Absolute held by 
Hamilton and Mansel. The First Cause is cer- 
tainly an impossible absolute, if cause be used in 
its ordinary sense as something antecedent to 
and existing entirely outside of the effect. The 
true Absolute is the totality of causes and effects. 
If the Absolute be thought as wholly character- 
less, a mere absence of relations, it is very easy 
to show that it is inconceivable. Is not the Ab- 
solute to be thought rather as the total reality of 
things, embracing all relations within itself as a 
self-related individuality ? Again, the true In- 
finite is not the mere negation of the finite, but 
the presupposition and completion of the finite 
as given in experience. 

In our search for knowledge of the real which 
is presented to us in experience we are led ever 
farther into a world of complex relations, of unity 
in difference. This is a strong presumption that 
relations belong in some way to Reality. By 
relations I do not mean mere bloodless cate- 
gories, but relations of energy, of will and feel- 
ing, as well as of discursive thought. If knowl- 
edge is valid in any sense, then the growth of 
human experience in complexity or interrelated- 



122 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

ness is a disclosure of the nature of reality. The 
goal of human knowledge and action is the con- 
crete Individual, and this goal will find its fufil- 
ment in the thought of the Absolute Individual. 

Mr. Spencer's conclusion is that the Absolute 
is Force. '* The power which manifests itself in 
consciousness is but a differently conditioned 
form of the power which manifests itself beyond 
consciousness.*'^ ** The last stage reached is 
recognition of the truth that force as it exists 
beyond consciousness, cannot be like what we 
know as force within consciousness ; and that yet 
as either is incapable of generating the other, 
they must be different modes of the same. Con- 
sequently the final outcome of that speculation 
commenced by primitive man is that the Power 
manifested throughout the universe distinguished 
as material, is the same Power which in ourselves 
wells up under the form of consciousness.'' ^ 

The ** Unknowable," then, possesses the single 
positive attribute of being ** Power" or '* En- 
ergy." But ** Energy" is a particular category 
of self-conscious thought. It cannot be used in 
this offhand fashion to designate the total reality. 
Like Space, Time, Matter, and Motion, *' En- 
ergy " is simply a relatively abstract mode under 
which thought conceives experience. ** Energy" 
is a name for one generalized aspect of expe- 
rience. ** Energy," then, as a term to designate 

^ Principles of Sociology, III., p. 170. "^ Ibid,, p. 171. 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 123 

reality, is a mode of conceiving a single aspect of 
reality. Like the other categories above named, 
it is a relatively abstract, incomplete expression 
for reality as experienced. To offer *'an Infinite 
and Eternal Energy '' as the ultimate explanation 
of existence is to explain the whole by the part, 
to make the tail wag the dog. One might as 
well call the Absolute Infinite Space or Time. 

The mere category of energy offers no expla- 
nation of the significance of human personalities. 
It does not account for the self-consciousness 
from which knowledge of energy itself springs. 
The mechanical explanation of things is a mode 
of thinking part of our experience, and arises from 
the practical need which the human mind has of 
conceiving the external world for purposes of cal- 
culation in the simplest possible terms. But we 
have no right to extend this conception to the 
explanation of the whole of experience. For this 
explanation does not account for the origin, nor 
can it explain away the value, of the many-sided 
self-conscious life of human experience, with its 
poignant feelings and its unceasing struggle to 
find expression and satisfaction in the forms of 
truth, beauty, and goodness. If the category of 
energy or power is but a means of comprehend- 
ing the movement of the world, and springs from 
the self's practical needs, it carries in itself no 
justification for the subordination to it of those 
categories which express higher human values. 



124 MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

If we must satisfy our metaphysical craving by 
setting up a single principle to explain experi- 
ence, let such a principle be found by the reinter- 
pretation of consciousness in the wholeness of its 
life as once affective and expressive, receptive and 
active. For self-consciousness holds within its 
own concrete unity all the various aspects and 
kinds of experience, and these lose their meaning 
and value when they are permanently isolated 
from the unity of the experiencing self. 

The Absolute may not, then, indeed be fully 
known, but it will be intelligible and self-con- 
sistent, since it will be conceived as in some way 
continuous with and the completion of human 
experience. It will appear as the fruition of 
human ideals. The Absolute will be thought as 
the sustaining and harmonizing central experi- 
ence from which no phase of conscious life is ex- 
cluded, but in which each phase of experience 
has its place determined by its value for the 
whole spiritual life, i,e.^ by its degree of spir- 
ituality. Indeed, the nature of the Absolute can 
only be adequately defined after a careful esti- 
mation and appreciation of the various activities 
of consciousness. To carry out this work with 
completeness would involve a comparative phi- 
losophy of knowledge, aesthetics, ethics, and relig- 
ion on a historical basis. It may turn out that 
the idea of the Absolute so defined is analogous 
in content to the God of the highest religion. If 



MR. SPENCER'S UNKNOWN GOD 125 

this should be so, then the idea of God con- 
tained in any given form of historical religion 
will be expressive of its conception of the ideals 
of truth, beauty, and goodness fused with and 
modified by racial characteristics and historically 
inherited systems of culture. This idea of relig- 
ion gives us the plan for a philosophy of religion. 
For the ends of metaphysics and of religion are the 
same, but in a sense very different from that held 
by Mr. Spencer. Metaphysics, critical and inter- 
pretative in its method, will wait upon, clear up, 
and unify concrete knowledge, conduct, art, and 
religion rather than endeavor to anticipate or 
supplant the intuitions of ethical and rehgious 
experience. 



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